


The Edges

by Go0se



Series: Origin Story [1]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), My Chemical Romance
Genre: Bandom Big Bang 2016, Families of Choice, Grief/Mourning, Growing Up, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Multi, POV Girl Character, Slice of Life, Slice of life with rayguns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-15 10:52:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 71,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8053543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Go0se/pseuds/Go0se
Summary: How the youngest Fabulous killjoy found her name.Featuring four people who weren't in a band called My Chemical Romance, a ten year old who wasn't a spy, a diner that no one can find on a map, a totalitarian government (of course) that manufactures all the maps, improbable geography, clothes that matter, music that matters, food that doesn't matter all that much, and a cat who may or may not be a metaphor. Fun Ghoul tries to help; Party Poison needs to keep everyone alive; Kobra Kid is called on to dispense wisdom; Jet Star watches out and keeps spirits up. And Grace, she just wants to go home.





	1. Prologue: Tonight In Jungleland

**Author's Note:**

> Finished, edited, weeped over and posted for Bandom Big Bang 2016, although I've had this in the works for a LONG-ASS TIME. All-caps amounts of time, everyone. (Like this is the last portion of a four-part series, and when I started I meant finish it 'before their next album came out'. Yeah. Yeah.)
> 
> Huge thank you to the wonderful [Syrupwit](http://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit), who made a fanmix for this fic! It is [here](http://8tracks.com/tillinghastly/spark-in-you) at 8tracks, [here ](https://www.dropbox.com/s/h868ybzzn3stalo/sparkinu.zip?dl=0) for download, and Syrupwit's tracklist rationale is [here ](http://syrupwit.tumblr.com/private/150519456679/tumblr_odmo04Mq1G1uo15f0)(though somewhat spoilery!). Please listen to it and give your appreciation.
> 
> Many thanks to: [Shotasammy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/shotasammy) for helping me edit; my lovely long-suffering non-bandom friends, for listening and encouraging me for so long, particularly Mistresspiece, and also Nano who has recently fallen into the killjoy hell pit with me at long last. You are all great people and I love you.  
> Additional thank you to MCR, and Gerard in particular, of course, for the band and the album and the comic (which I cheerfully ignored whenever the hell it suited me).
> 
> And finally thank you to you! I hope you enjoy.
> 
> ~

“I went out into the night,  
I went out to pick a fight-- with anyone.”  
- _'Neighbourhood #2: Power Out', Arcade Fire_  


_  
_ “Do it now and do it loud!”

 _-Dr. Death-Defying_  
  
  


 

 

It was Fun Ghoul who first found the kid. An accident of timing; the others were only a half-step behind, but he had known that there was a single hydrated can of Caffeinated Beverage right in the back of the long counter inside and damned if anyone except him was going to get to it. Slower men could go fuck themselves.

So he'd come barreling in through the side door, snickering when he heard Party Poison's shouted threats from inside the garage (he was a slow man), and had already vaulted over the counter with his hand on the sacred coffee knock-off when he realized that the flare of dusty white under the table a straight shot from where he was standing hadn’t been there when the crew had left.

He almost pumped off an actual shot too, his brain going directly from 'white' to 'danger' and getting his blaster out of its holster almost before he had conscious thought.

The Drac wasn't moving; he didn't know if it'd just not noticed him somehow or what, but he stalked right over to it and dragged it out from under the booth's table by the scruff of its jacket, blaster ready. He breathed in, ready to hold his air against the blood spatter and shoot to kill.

But it wasn't a Drac. It was a kid.

Ghoul was so surprised that he actually dropped them with a dull thunk. A _kid._

Their eyes opened at their head's connection with the diner floor, woozily, and stared up at him like they had no idea what they were looking it. Their eyes were brown, caked with dust around the outside, and deep like they were still two-sixths dreaming. They looked sun-baked almost to the bone. Ghoul could feel the heat radiating off of them the same way it radiated off the ground outside. The kid's skin was dark like Jet's, but the kid’s cheeks and the top of their nose definitely still had a red tint to them, burnt crisp. The skin on their forehead right above the space between their eyebrows had started to peel off in thin layers, revealing slightly paler skin underneath. Freckles covered their face where it wasn't burned. The kid had hair like Jet's too. Lighter colour but all curly-Qs growing all over the place.

 

There was a great crash from behind him and hurried footsteps, the tell-tale sound of denim sliding briefly over the old-ass plastic of the counter and then a loud curse. "Fuck you and your mother and your mother's pets," Kobra Kid's complained behind Ghoul.

"You should’ve killed me when you had the chance," Ghoul called over his shoulder reflexively. He checked that his Caffeinated Beverage can was tucked securely on the inside of his done-up vest with his extra fuel cells for Fun Ghoul II, and then looked back down at the kid.

Their eyes had slid shut. They were breathing kinda quick, he thought, although he wasn't an expert in the subject. That would be the dude who was still pushing around things in the counter like there would be another can someone had missed somewhere (fat chance) and seething silently in that loud way he had.

"Hey snake brain," Ghoul said. "Need your eyes over here."

"Why--" Kobra actually looked over and then cut off his own dumb question. “What the _balls_.”  
Ghoul raised his eyebrows as high as he could without pulling them off his face. No shit.  
  
Kobra abandoned his caffeine-searching, joining Ghoul in a crouch beside the little one. He didn't say anything except in mostly dumfounded staring. "It's a kid," he said inanely. "Why the hell is there a kid here?"

Ghoul shrugged, re-sticking his blaster in his holster again. Whatever threat this kid might be (he wasn't immediately fooled just because of the cuteness, okay, he was _not_ ), they were too out of it now to even get up. "You know as much as I do." He nudged Kobra in the ribs. "You'd know more if you checked them over," he said pointedly. "They don't look too hot, huh?"

Kobra crouched down with a creak in his bony knees and took off his fingerless gloves so he could reach out careful-handed. He pressed carefully on a spot on the kid's neck, then on their forehead and the spot just by their cheek under their ear. "I'd say too hot as a problem," he said. He scrutinized the kid’s sunburn-peeling skin. "Help me pull 'em out the whole way."  
The two of them did. After the kid’s boots were clear of the table’s shadow, Ghoul stepped back a little, giving the med man room to do his observing work.

The mystery kid didn't look any better when they could see all of them, splayed out on the floor. “The motorbaby's definitely been walking a long way," Kobra muttered. "These boots are scraggly as shit, look."

The kid's boots were ragged. That wasn't that weird; almost every dusty body had boots that could use replacing. What was weird was the kid's _jacket_. Pants, too, but less obviously. They were loose and looked like they might have been white, once upon a time, and there were three familiar letters stamped in the seam of one of the pockets. BLI. City stuff, what dead eyes wore to and from their work or school or whatever. But they were also torn up, like the kid hadn't had anything else to wear for a long-ass time; the blankness of the jacket was mixed up by the kid's shirt, too, a Hectic Glow one that someone must've shook out themselves at one of the travelling band shows. The kid had a faded pale purple bandana tied across their mouth and nose. No city face carried those. They had mass-produced circular rebreathers instead, gross boring looking things-- or Drac masks, of course. More to the point, no cityface got _out_ this far without a Drac mask, no matter how old. Let alone a roadgoblin who wasn't old enough to even stand with two feet aground on a bike.    

Kobra gingerly pulled the bandana off of the kid's mouth. They were breathing but only barely. The skin of their lips was cracked and dried with blood in some places.  
Kobra's own face twisted a little. "Dehydration," he muttered. “On top of the sun sickness. Probably lacerations somewhere on the feet, from all the walking.”

Ghoul frowned. “Well, shit.” He felt worse—worry and sorrow—for accidentally dropping the tyke now that he knew they were all sick like this, but he quashed down the feeling like he’d squash a spring that had popped out of place. Kobra could help the kid, if anyone was gonna. Now wasn’t the time for Ghoul’s feelings.

 

At that moment, just to make the atmosphere a little more lively and fun, the rest of their crew came trooping in. Jet Star in front, Party Poison behind him. They were uptalking about the show they saw at the Fuck You House they'd just come back from, the same one they'd go back to tomorrow if the weather kept up nice. Ghoul whistled at them and then said, “Hey, sorry to break up the chitchat but we've got an interloper.” **  
** “What?” Poison asked sharply.

Ghoul stepped back and then gestured grandly with his hand. They wouldn't believe him if he said it out loud.  
While the two of them walked forward and got their gawk on, both of them saying the obvious out loud, Ghoul crouched back down, opposite Kobra who was still crouching there with one hand on the very upper part of the kid's skinny chest. He kept half a finger-measure or so down from the thin hollow of their neck.  
To know if they stopped breathing, Ghoul guessed, and tried to suppress a feeling of horror that welled up at the thought. He was curious, now; he hadn't seen a kid unattended for a long time out here. And this roadgoblin's clothes suggested they had a weird tale to them. Plus, how in the fuck they had ended up _here_ was a yarn in itself. That was always entertaining, especially if you could respin it to someone like Doctor D and have him make the most of it possible. More simply, well shit, they were a _kid._ They couldn't just send a motorbaby back out to the desert with a cracked mouth and so heat crazy they couldn't stand up anymore. No fucking way.

“I found them,” he said, making the others look up at him. He had his hands hooked through his belt loops and a steady gaze as he looked at the others. “I say we keep them.”

“What? This isn't a fucking...” Poison paused, looking around for words, “They aren’t a goddamn piece of tech or something, you dick. You can't just grab them up and say you found them so they’re yours.”  
“Well then, what?” Kobra said steadily. He looked up at Poison over his shoulder from where he was crouched, still keeping track of the youngling's breathing and heartbeat. He didn't say it like a challenge, just a smooth question of fact.

Poison didn’t go unquestioned, but more often than not, he ended up getting last word. Jet and Ghoul looked over at him too, empty–handed and without speaking.  
Well then, what? What other choice did they have?  
  



	2. First Few Desperate Hours

When Grace woke up next her head was clear. It, along with the rest of her, was in a dark room that smelled like mildew. The only light came from three lightsticks, all placed evenly around the mound of blankets—and, it seemed, jackets--that she was lying on.   
Grace rolled over and saw someone sitting in the doorway; tall and puffy-haired. 

Her heart, fragile and ridiculous, swelled in her chest.  


As Grace watched, the person untied their dark spotted bandana with its weird mouth-shape and let her see their face.

 

Her heart sank. _You’re not my mom._

 

“My name’s Jet Star,” the man said. The name sounded familiar but not for a reason she could place right then. “You’re in our diner, with us—with me and my friends. We’re not going to hurt you.”

Grace rolled over again, pulling part of the bundle with her and closing her eyes.  When she heard the man come further into the room, she curled up tightly, protecting herself. Her hand went to her hip, but there wasn’t anything for her to hold. They’d taken her blaster. Her knife, too. 

Her eyes burn and she screwed them shut tighter. She wasn’t going to cry here. She _wasn’t._

“Kobra patched up your feet,” the man called Jet Star said. “You had some blisters, and sun fever pretty bad… the other guys got you some medicine for it, you ate it, but you might not remember. You’ve been sleeping for almost two days.”

 _Two days. Two days. Two days._ Grace craned her head and saw her shoes sitting together at the end of the pile of blankets.  Was this place actually a diner? Who were the ‘other guys’? Where _was_ she?

Somewhere deep in the building something fell with a loud crash. Angry voices followed it.  Grace remembered cartilage crunching under her fingers and a screaming man with blood down his face. She pulled the blankets up more, totally over her head. _Don’t expect answers from strangers. They’ll want something back. And you don't have any back–up here._

She could hear the man kneeling beside her, his feet crunching on the floor. “What’s your name, motorbaby?”

She didn’t say anything. 

He sat there for another few seconds, and then sighed. Something clinked on the ground beside her.  “That’s food, when you’re hungry. We, uh, we had to take your knife and your blaster. In case you started getting shakes. And we don’t know you, so...”

Grace forced herself to say nothing. 

Eventually the man walked out of the room.  The door clunked shut behind him. (The room _had_ a door.)

 

The ten-year-old kept her eyes shut tight. Her hand crept to her neck and found the small metal pendant of a dove which she’d kept there, even when the silver cord of the necklace had started burning her skin in the sun. She pressed her arms against her nose.  
She remembered what Hope had said about the necklace, before she’d handed it over to Grace as a goodbye present. Even after all this time she could sort of smell her mama’s perfume in the coat.

Or maybe that was just her imagination and she didn't have anything of her family left at all.

Either way, she was too tired to cry. ****  
  
*  


After a while she ate the food. It was just a regular Power Pup can that looked like it was sealed tight enough that it couldn’t’ve been poisoned. Even if it had, she’d die without food too, it’d just be slower.

The Pup was a little gross and warm from all the heat, but eatable. It sat like wet sand in her belly so she didn’t have too much, hiding the half-full can under the blanket with its lid wrenched back on as best as she could so there’d be less crawlies creeping in it if she wanted to finish it later.

After some work, she managed to peel herself out of the blanket pile. She inspected the damage on her feet, wincing as she took off the strips of ripped cloth that Kobra (whoever Kobra was) had used like bandages. It felt worse than it looked; there wasn’t any blood, just gross blisters. Grace wrinkled her nose. She decided to tie the cloths back on in case any of the blisters popped. Hope had that happen once, back in Murder City just after they’d got there, and she’d ran up to Grace to show her how gross her socks looked--  
Grace squeezed her eyes shut and took a couple deep breaths, past the sharp hole in her chest. She pressed her face into her arm like that would help. _She’s gone,_ Grace thought to herself, _Stop thinking about it. Stop it._  
A few seconds later she shook her head. Then, wobbily, she tried to push herself to her feet.

It hurt to stand and to walk. She had to use the wall to balance, and even then, she fell after a couple of steps. Hurt feet and two days of lying down could do that, she guessed, and she had to hold still as a blast of _stupid_ hit her from every direction.  
Still, she wasn’t going to just sit in here and not know where she was. Grace grit her teeth. She could see what was outside this little room, even if she had to move really slow.

 

 

It took her a few tries. She wasn’t sure how long, since there was light in the room she’d woken up in but no windows. She was dizzy too, and exhausted, so after a while she just sat down. Grace might’ve fallen asleep again. It was hard to tell. The sunshine calling himself Jet Star showed up at the little room's door to look down at her every so often—he said he was “just making sure”—and she didn't want to ask him anything, so she always just froze where she was whenever she heard his steps on the worn floor outside the door. That didn’t make it any easier.  


After a while, though, she wasn’t so dizzy anymore, and she’d been listening with her breath held for sounds in the rest of the building but there hadn’t been anything for what seemed like a really long time. She pulled her shoes on, wincing, and then finally risked pushing open the door.

  
Immediately outside the room she’d been lying in was another small room, with two doors, three counting the one behind her. Grace stared for a second, confused. Then she pushed the one on the left. 

Outside _that_ door was what looked like the rest of the building. The sunshine who said he was Jet Star had called the place a diner, and when she crept carefully past the threshold, it seemed that way. It was quiet. Dust-coated windows lined the room (she shied away from them), sunlight making the view outside too bright to see; cracked plastic tiles covered the floor in the spots where concrete didn’t show through, and a long counter ran along the wall right across from the _super unsafe_ doors. There were booths too. Lots of them, mostly with tables still attached, bolted to the ground. Most of the cushioned parts of the booths were slashed open in little bits, like a rad-angry animal had clawed them all up. Or at least, it seemed like most of them were from the little corner that Grace stuck by, not wanting to move far from it.   

She almost faceplanted over her messenger bag when she tried to move farther into the room.  Someone had left it right outside the door to the mini-section of the diner she’d been sleeping in, like a weird booby-trap, as if the sunshines expected her to try to bolt at some point. After she’d caught herself Grace realized that she hadn’t even noticed it was missing, the whole time she’d waited. She felt kind of sick. Mama would kill her if--  
_Stop it._

She couldn't pick the bag up without her arms shaking, though she tried. She settled on just sitting (falling) on the ground and unzipping it. Her hands were only shaking a little bit. It looked like it always did, except dustier from being on the ground. Her blaster and knife weren’t there— _duh,_ she thought to herself. And she’d traded the last of her water a while back, in Glimmer (she couldn’t remember what she’d traded it for). The can of Pup she’d had was gone too.

The strange killjoys had left the little paper notebook, though, and the stub of a pencil that Grace had used to mark the days down with before days had stopped meaning anything.  She moved the notebook over carefully, not wanting to rip any of the pages, and then saw Gear.  The little toy robot was warm but not burning when she pulled it out. She held it for a while, just staring. It looked the same as it always had since the junk punks had given her it—grimy, metal, colourful. Grace pressed her head to Gear’s boxy chest for a minute, and then put it beside her on the floor.

At the very bottom of the bag was some loose rocks, broken pieces of old plastic plates, empty wrappers from mouthbursters, and her purple bandana. Burns’ bandana. She twisted it in her hands and then tied it over her nose and mouth. She didn’t use it to wipe her face. It’d be better to keep out the dust than cry over a stupid thing. Again.  
Even with half of the stuff in it missing and the other half kind of useless, Grace was glad that she’d found the bag, that it was still around. She’d had it for so long.  
She couldn’t carry it with her now though, so she put everything except her bandana back into the bag, then went back into the little room and tucked it under the hump of blankets she’d been using as a pillow. At least there she’d know where it was.    


After waiting and listening to see if the killjoys would come back, again, Grace ventured outside the building. Despite how gross the sun was, it felt kind of nice to feel the breeze again. She made it just far enough into the parking lot-slash-gas station in front of the diner to look up and see the huge letters on the roof. Some of them were burnt out and fallen over. They spelled out ‘dier’ all together. She wondered if they were trying to be funny.

The sun reflected off the windows like it was intent on murdering Grace personally. Grace's head pounded. She kept both of her eyes squinted so she could focus, then walked around the edge of the building, her shoulders wound up tight waiting for any human-like noise.

Attached to the one side of the diner was a huge, messy lean-to. It wasn’t made out of the same brick and plaster as the rest of the building—it wasn’t made out of brick at all, just a bunch of wood and nails stuck together with a lot of spray paint. When she found a loose board and peeked inside it turned out to be a garage full of tables and broken chairs. There was a rectangle of empty space in the middle of the floor where a car could go. Through the board, Grace could see a MouseKat breather mask sitting on one of the benches on the far wall.

Cartoon characters watching her in the desert. Grace remembered. She’d thought it’d been a dream, the kind you get when your brain’s spiking hard like hers must’ve been. But apparently it was real, too.

She shook her head and let the plank fall back into place.

The back of the diner consisted of a graffiti-covered outside wall with one door, and then a lot of nothing for miles around. On the other side, there was a huge cylindrical tank of metal and rust that had a ladder attached at one end. The stamped letters on the side read “DIESEL”. Grace didn’t know what that was, or why whoever the diner had belonged too before would need so much of it. Whatever it was, the sun had baked it so hot that she could see the air around it in shimmering waves.

 

Her feet were starting to ache too much to ignore. She walked back to the dusty front doors of the diner, hesitated, but then went back inside.

No matter how badly she wanted to go home, wherever she was was way too far out. She couldn’t even see the Battery City dome from here. She didn’t know how to get to the junk punks from wherever this place was, either, if they’d even want her back after how she’d left.

Like it or not—and Grace didn’t—she was stuck here for now.

Instead of going back into the mildewy room to sleep, though, Grace took her shoes and her bag and curled up in the corner of one of the vinyl booths that ringed the main room of the place. She grabbed the half-full can of Pup, too, and finished it quickly and quietly under the table. She left the can on top of the booth, not sure what else to do with it. She took off the bandana and stored it safely in her bag again, then tucked herself in between the (dusty, almost non-see-through) window and the seat. She’d wait.  
Her feet pulsed and her throat hurt. It was emptier out here, but she felt safer, a little. There were more places to run. 

 

 

 

By the time the killjoys came back from wherever they’d all went, the sunlight slanting in through the windows had changed directions. Grace watched them from under the table in the corner, where she’d laid down after the vinyl of the seat had felt sticky from her sweat.  
It turned out there were four of them, counting Jet Star, all with different hair and different colours and different voices. Short-yellow, long-red, long-black, curly black. They were tall, easily all adults. They talked loud and rude and laughed about it. They didn’t seem to see her.  
As they moved around and joked with each other, a tiny part of the suspended panic in Grace's chest eased. Even with all the stuff she'd seen outside in the garage, and the dirtiness of the building, she’d worried that it'd been a nest of Dracs that had picked her up. No policeman would ever talk like the sunshines in front of her did.

After a minute she decided to get off of the floor. She climbed back up into the corner of her booth, sitting with her knees bent up to her chin and her bag clutched to her chest, staring at them from under her hair.

One of the Killjoys—the one with yellow hair—finally noticed her looking at them. He mumbled something she couldn't hear to the others and then came over, carrying something small and silver in one hand and a white bottle in the other. “Here, motorkid,” he said, shoving both at her.

Grace shrunk back against the cushion, tightening her hands around her bag.

The blonde man frowned, and then put the can and the bottle on top of the table, directly in front of her. The top of the can was pried open. It smelled like processed meat.  “Eat it when you’re hungry, then,” he said, and walked back to the now considerably quieter group.

 

Grace waited, but none of the others came to talk to her or even matched her gaze. Eventually, all of them trooped out of an Emergency Exit door on the far wall. It must lead into the lean-to she’d seen from outside.

When they were all out of her sight she cracked the lid off the second can and ate it. She tried to be careful at first—she didn’t know when she’d be able to find some more grub—but suddenly she’d finished the whole thing and her stomach was still growling.  

Grace swallowed and then set aside the empty can, as far away from her as she could so the sand bugs wouldn’t try crawling on her for more food in the night. She looked at the BLI-brand plastic bottle that the killjoy had set down, suspiciously, but then cracked it open too. A body’d die just as fast from not drinking as she would from not having food. She’d just have to be more careful to make the water last.

 

 

*

 

Grace slept out in the diner, curled sharply in the same spot she’d been sitting the whole afternoon. She didn’t know what else to do. She felt a little better now, having drank some and ate some, but still… like… like she didn’t know. Like she’d felt when she was stumbling her way through the desert, light-blind and sad, before she’d ended up here. Like nothing was real.

It didn’t help that none of the killjoys had said anything else to her the rest of the day. When the light outside had drained enough that everyone just looked like ghosts, the four had trooped back in the diner from whatever they were doing outside. Two of them went back into the small rooms that Grace had walked out from earlier. Two others—Jet Star, and the black-haired killjoy—set up behind the counter, talking and joking back and forth for a while. Again, they didn’t seem to care that she was listening to them.      

 

The next morning the black-haired killjoy and Jet Star were gone, and Grace didn’t see the redhead anywhere either.

The skinny blond one was there, though. A couple minutes after she’d woken up and looked around, while staying in her seat because _ow her feet,_ he’d walked right in by the front doors. He was carrying a bag in one hand and had dark sunglasses on that made him look like he had bug eyes. They’d seen each other over the top of the booth’s cushion and both froze for a second, like lizards in headlights.

The sunshine had shaken himself out of it first. He’d rubbed a patch clean on his sunglasses and then walked over to where Grace was balanced on the seat.

She shrunk down immediately, sliding backwards on her seat and holding her bag at her side like a shield.  
But he only perched himself on the of the bench on the other side of the table. He didn’t have his gun out. He rummaged around for a second and then pulled out another can, and another unmarked, unopened bottle of BLI-grade water, which he slid (and rolled) across the table towards her slowly.

Grace caught them before they could fall on her or the ground.

The killjoy nodded, then cleared his throat. “There’s a latrine,” he said.

Grace stared at him.

“Out back,” he elaborated. “We don’t have any paper rolls but there’s some ripped up mag leaves. Not Shiny ones or anything,” he added quickly. “Just junk mail. Latrine itself is the thin thing in the grove of weeds, on the left. Kinda short, but, it should be a good size for you, so…” He shrugged, playing with something in his hands.

She craned her head slightly. It turned out it was a tightly wrapped wire ball with something metal in the middle of it. It looked more like a piece of tech than a bomb, at least. She looked back at his face, but decided not to nod or anything.

A moment or two later he stood up. “Just so you know,” he said. He scratched the back of his head under his dyed hair, nodded at nothing in particular, and then disappeared out the front door into the desert again.  He hung out there, in the front of the place. He didn’t seem to be concerned about anything. Just fished a can out of his bag and started drinking from it.

 

When Grace had been with the junk punks, before all of them had started talking to her or Hope much, the only one to stick around like this had been Skitter. But the killjoy didn’t seem like Skitter had. Maybe the crew here just left one person behind at their base all the time. Maybe he’d stayed there only to make sure she didn’t crack into pieces and make weird smoke stains on the booths’ plastic. Maybe the latrine was a trick, or a lie he’d made up.

Still, she _was_ having gut-cramps pretty bad. After watching the sunshine suspiciously for a minute, Grace slid off the cracked plastic seat and limped for the Emergency Exit door.

As she’d thought, it led out into the lean-to garage, and the loose plank that she found let out into the open Zone air. It was much hotter outside than yesterday but thankfully not  as skull-dry. The sky seemed more electric than usual.

Finding the latrine (which turned out to not be a trick) was easy. There was a short path already worn into the dirt. It lead into the tall, dry brush that lined a small dip in the desert’s crust just a little ways away from the diner, the kind that might’ve been a creek once upon a time. Plus—and this was gross—she could kind of smell it, even upwind and from this far away.  She paused for a second, wondering if it was even worth it—but yeah.  She just pulled the neck of her t-shirt up over her nose and tried to hold her breath.

When she'd closed the shaky wooden door behind her, she noticed a little can by her feet. It looked like it was filled with shimmery desert sky and didn’t smell like anything. Water, obviously. Not sweet stuff, since she couldn't drink it, but something anyway. She looked around like there'd be a clue written in the sand somewhere, and then just went with what she guessed was right: dumping part of the can clumsily over her one hand and then washing both of them.

It didn't make her hands feel as clean as the anti-germ goo packs that the junk punks had hoarded used to, but she felt a little bit better.  


The blond sunshine was still standing outside the two glass double doors when she slipped back into the building. He’d changed out of his jacket, safe in the shadow of the building’s awning, and had swapped out his drink for a cancer stick.

He had something at his feet, she realized.  It looked like a transistor radio, the kind that went two ways if you knew how to work out.

The blond one looked up at her through the smudged dusty glass. Again she froze, lizard-quick, as if the light shadows inside the diner could actually hide her from someone looking straight in.

The killjoy blinked-- or didn't, she couldn't tell 'cause of the sunglasses-- and then dropped the burner that he'd been puffing on into the sand. He picked up the radio, holding it with his palms flat like you'd hold a gift from someone precious, and used his hip to open the door with a nudge.

Grace was stuck by the Emergency door. Not knowing what else to do, she sat down on the nearest table. Her feet were throbbing again.

The sunshine didn't seem to take notice of her, though, instead just ambled through the diner in easy steps. Easy, but fast: he went from having his back up against the glass doors to having his back against the booth, quick enough to be someone who thought about it. He settled into the same cushion as he'd sat on to talk to her. The transistor was still in his hands. even though he could've shifted sideways and put it on the table. With a glance, he seemed to clock that she was still standing there. "Your feet stuck to the floor or what roadgoblin?" He asked, like he didn't really care too bad either way.

Grace looked at him.  
He was still wearing the fly eyes glasses, so she couldn't tell if he was actually looking back at her or not. She wondered if he was _avoiding_ looking at her, like you'd not look at a wild animal because it might hurt you, or itself. Or scamper off, but most likely the first two. Grace felt like he was doing it on purpose, but he didn’t say anything. He just focused on the radio. “We haven’t poisoned the grub, you know,” he said. Then added, without looking up, "You ever heard of the Sparkle Hive? Out in Two?"

She was not sure how she felt about being thought about, or at least acted toward, like she's wildlife that might scramble away or attack without warning. She decided she didn't mind the second one too bad, especially if it kept the killjoys away from being close to her. “Maybe not,” she said. The killjoy didn't seem like he was moving anymore, so she took the opportunity to gingerly walk across the floor and then slide into what she'd started to think of, dangerously she knew, as 'her' seat. It felt a little better to have something solid at her back than just a table. “What's it to you?”

The sunshine shrugged both his skinny shoulders in response, easy as anything. Calm. He could put up a good front. "Heard a little sugarspice busted a Shark Eye's nose there a fair while ago. Wondering if you might know anything 'bout them."

"Who'd you hear _that_ from? Heard a couple of weeks ago there was a blond-headed kid with dumb glasses shot up an outpost, you know anything about that?”

She hadn't heard anything like it, not actually. The sunshine did look kind of familiar though, maybe. Grace wondered which tunnel he’d popped up from.

Instead of answering her argue-question, he nodded smoothly like a droid would. He was messing with the transistor radio again. And, possibly, with her.

 

“You going to tell us your name yet, motorgoblin?” He asked after a while.  
Grace looked up sharply. She’d been trying to stealth-open the bottle of water, but it wasn’t working.  “Still no,” she said. An anti–relax to his pretending that they were at all friends, or whatever.

He nodded, slowly. “Fair enough,” he said, and then stood up and ambled away.  
Grace stared after him, frowning.  


  
-


	3. Stakeouts Are For Snakes

It took a couple of days before she figured it out.  
  
During those days Grace ate and drank what the killjoys handed to her, after they were out of the room. She napped, waited for her feet to stop hurting, and didn’t really feel much of anything. She knew that she _should,_ but it was like her head was a radio station and nothing-sound was the only thing coming through. She read the old notes that she, Hope, and some of the junk punks had written in her notebook. She played with Gear by herself on the table, and tried not to remember how when she’d first got it she’d shared it with Hope so the eight-year-old controlled the feet and the fake robotic voice while Grace moved the head and arms.

Hope being gone but still _everywhere_ wasn’t fair at all. Grace might’ve been angry about it, or sad, but instead she was just static.

She watched the killjoys come into the diner and leave again. Sometimes they’d come closer into her orbit. When they did, she curled up and didn’t say anything. All of them looked familiar, in that sticks-to-your-brain way that didn’t mean actual answers, the same way the blond one had.

Grace didn’t explore much. Partly because she just didn’t want to—not feeling like anything meant not feeling like _anything_ —and partly because she didn’t want to accidentally go somewhere she shouldn’t’ve found, or break something, and have the killjoys get angry with her. None of them had seemed angry with her literally falling into their base, yet, but that didn’t matter. They were adults; they’d get mad at her eventually no matter what she did. Better to put it off as long as she could.

 

She’d been sitting at her table with her head leaned back, counting dots on the ceiling, when the redhead sunshine had taken a seat across from her for no particular reason.

He sat differently than the blond killjoy, lounging instead of coiling like a spring. He had his blue leather Pegasus jacket again. He’d worn it during the brief moments she’d seen him before right then, too, but for some reason it was only then that the reality clicked.  
“You're the Fabulous killjoys,” she said without meaning too.  
The redhead—Poison, she thought that was his name, or at least part of his name. Poison something. He looked up, seeming surprised.  
Grace stuttered, but couldn’t stop talking now that she’d realized. “All those—the Wanted posters the Dracs put up all over the place. Those are you.” _Jet Star,_ of course. He’d told her the very first day, when she’d first woke up.

The killjoy gave a little smile. “Yeah,” he said. “How'd you learn that, motorbaby?”

She scowled. “I'm not green,” she said. 

_Everyone_ knew the Fabulous killjoys.  They weren’t the biggest gang (that was the Rats, all five kinds), or the most bashing-in (skinrippers, who you prayed you never found), but they were most talked about. Flashiest, most colourful. You heard the most stories about them.  
Stories could be twisted, though. Colour and flash didn't mean safe; they just meant shiny. And shiny things could cut. She sank down behind her side of the table again, pulling up her hands and putting her hands on her knees so she wouldn’t have to look at the killjoy.   
After a moment, she still heard him sigh.  She peeked over the top of her fingers.

Poison was looking at her, running his fingers through his hair. He did that a lot, so much that there was bright red--and blue, which was weird-- spreading all over his hands. “… hey,” he said, trying to smooth over her awkward drop-off of his last questions. “Look, honey—your colours are getting pretty grimy. Which is saying something, coming from me.” He chuckled a little, and then stopped when she didn’t laugh too. “The guys—I mean, we’re going out for a supply run, and there’s a trash-heap on the way. If you came, we’d… oh,” he faltered, when she shook her head from side to side “Oh-kay.” He was quiet for a second. 

Grace could feel the heat of the air drying out her throat.  Her hand crept up to her necklace, safely hidden under her shirt, and pressed on it. She wasn’t going to let go of anything she had. Like _hell._ She wanted to drink some water. She stared at Poison, willing him to leave.

He cleared his throat. “At least take this, sugarhead,” he said, and he reached down beside him and dropped a large bundle of fabric onto the table.  “… it’s a _blanket_ ,” he offered when she didn’t reach for it.  He sounded exasperated now. “Makes sure your toes don’t fall off at night.  We can hear your teeth chattering all the way in the Am.”

What did she think she was, an idiot? “I don’t trade,” she said, stung. “You keep it.”

He stared at her for a second. “You don’t have to _trade_ anything. We’re giving it to you. You need to keep warm.”

“Why?”

Poison’s face twisted up like he was confused. “Because… because you’ll get sick if you don’t.”

That wasn’t what she meant.  “Why did you _bring_ me here? Or decide to let me stay, or, or whatever it is.” Grace put her knees down, pressed her feet on the floor, and glared right at him. “Tell me,” she demanded.

Poison looked incredulous. “Honey,” he said-- and _why_ did he keep calling her that? What did it even mean?  “We let you stay here because we didn’t want you to die.”

Grace didn’t have anything to say to that. A vague sense of shame welled up in her throat.

She looked away, pulling the blanket off the table and balling it up beside her.  It didn’t feel super warm, but it was soft. Much better than using her own jacket to sleep under. She didn't say thank you, of course—no killjoy said “thank you” out loud—but she let herself nod stiffly.

Poison smiled. He looked sort of pretty when he did that. It was hard to remember he’d downed so many Dracs that people talked him up all over three Zones. “You’re sure you won’t come with us? We could get you new feathers, there’d be tons of different stuff there, it’d…”

Grace shook her head again before he’d finished the sentence. She hadn't let go of her jacket when she was with— before now. She definitely wasn't going to lose them _here._

His smile faded, and he sighed.  “Crystal. If you’re sure.”

 

With a few squelches of denim against hot plastic he slid his way out of the booth, and then stood up, taking a minute to stretch out his legs.  He did the self-once-over that she’d gotten used to seeing Zone Runners do: belt, blaster, boots, head.  Combing his fingers through his hair only made it stick up more, and then he turned back to her.  “Jet’ll keep watch, outside, while we’re gone. If you need anything, just…”  He waved his hand vaguely toward the front doors of the diner. 

Grace turned in her seat. Through the cracked and dusty glass of the doors, she could see Jet Star leaning against the wall smoking something. 

Poison’s boots scuffed the floor, and she looked back at him.  He’d gotten down on one knee so that they were eye-to-eye. “I’m glad you’ve woke up, motorbaby,” he said.  And then, after a pause, he repeated, “We’re not going to hurt you.”

She’d been awake for days now. He was talking all weird. Still, she was starting to believe the second part. Maybe. She wove the cord of her sisters’ necklace through her fingers.  “Fine,” she said, and she meant it as the start of a truce.

 

Neither of them said anything more. After a few seconds he got up, turned and strode over to the open garage door, calling out at the same time. “Hey Ghoul! Get the wheels running.”

Someone yelled back at him with more creative use of words.  Then there was the sputter-catch of the engine starting and a blast of sound; a second later the voice of the blonde one joined in on the noise.  Then the garage door slammed and the cacophony quieted a little.

 

Grace peered around the edge of the booth toward the front doors.  Jet Star was still there, now sitting cross-legged and reloading his blaster.

She sat back up and picked up the blanket. She turned it over and sniffed it, curiously, then sneezed.  It didn’t seem rancid, though, so she wrapped it around herself carefully and wriggled like a sandworm until she was sideways on the bench, using her messenger bag as a pillow.  It was still too warm in the diner to really be comfy, but she knew it would reach freeze-out point real fast when the sun went down. With the blanket she almost felt relaxed again.

 

 

*

 

 

The days past. Slowly, her feet got better until they almost didn’t hurt at all. It sounded like a good thing, and was, but it made being at the diner kind of worse. Sure, she didn’t need to stay in the booth most of the time anymore. But there wasn’t a lot to _do_. Grace could probably have found something to kick around out in the front lot, like a rat with a piece of food, but she didn’t really want to kick or run around or do anything much at all. 

She wondered how long the killjoys would let her stay there, or if they just assumed she was still sick so they were letting her sleep off the sunlight. For… whatever reason they were letting her sleep off the sunsickness to begin with. Grace had no idea. Because they didn’t want her to die. If that _was_ the real reason, and Poison hadn’t been lying to her.

Maybe this kind of thing was just what zonerunners of a certain kind _did_ with roadgoblins who fell into their crews in a crisis. The way others would kill them, or the way Dracs would haul them away.

She hadn’t known why Skitter had saved her and Hope at that first firefight, either, and wondered if the answer was at simple as that, but she didn’t like to think about that for very long.

Grace didn’t feel like thinking much of anything at all either.

She slept a lot.  


She always knew she could leave. Every day she woke up with the sun pouring warm light on her face from the windows facing towards the road. She knew that way was East. If she walked the opposite way on the highway, then she would eventually get back to the City, to everything she’d known for her whole life.  
And then… meet Hope again, maybe, before the nobodyfaces made Grace forget her. Or go through all the security and medical checks to be a kid again, then grow up to be a teacher or baker or Exterminator like the City officials always wanted her to be. Never see the junk punks ever again. Never feel a rainstorm and not be scared. Forget her mama. Forget the desert, and the colours, and the music, and the sun.

 

  
Grace didn’t head West.

 

Eventually she did go outside again though. Boredom won out over tiredness, and if she didn’t want to _do_ anything, looking at things wasn’t really a kind of doing.

 

She’d wandered to the latrine and back, then to the side of the diner that had the huge metal tank with the ladder. She’d waited until the afternoon to go near it, so it wasn’t a huge baking heat ball. It sounded hollow when she kicked it.

She decided to try and climb it, since the ladder was there. She actually managed to get a pretty good foothold on one end, balancing her hands on the least rusty parts and hauling herself up so she could see over the top of the canister.  
A small, triangular face looked back at her.  
Grace flinched, going wide-eyed. Somehow her feet managed to stay underneath her, and only one of her hands scraped down the side of tank. There was a—a _cat_ sitting across from her.  
She was pretty sure it was a cat. She’d never seen a real one before. It was a tiny bundle of dark ragged fur all puddled together on top of the tank, in a small square of piping. It had four legs that looked like they’d been dipped in white paint at the very ends on the cat’s feet, and a very thin twitchy tail. Whiskers like electronics-wires stuck out of its face. It had a nose kind of like a raccoon did and eyes that got as round as wheels even as she stood there. While she was watching they went from mostly-green to mostly-black.  
That probably meant it was scared, or something. People’s eyes got big when they were scared. “Sorry,” Grace whispered very quietly. “I didn’t know you were here.”  
The cat still stayed where it was, like a statue.

Grace moved instead. She backed away, climbing down the easy handholds she’d found, not breathing or talking in case the cat got scared enough to run.  


She landed with both feet and a small huff. Safely on the ground again she waited, staring up at the corner of the tank for a twitch of a tail, or if it’d peer over the side down at her. It didn’t, after a couple of seconds. Maybe it needed more space. “I’ll just be leaving,” Grace said out loud, then very methodically walked around the corner to the front place of the diner.  
She got to the corner and leaned against the brick, just for a second, and then doubled back as fast as she could.

Her stomach sank down when she saw that the kitten had left. “Bye,” she said out loud, even though there was no one to hear it. She frowned at herself, then turned and kicked at the brick beside her. “You’re being stupid,” she mumbled. “Stop it.”  
Maybe if she left food outside, it’d come back. Maybe.

 

She checked around the building one more time, looking for a whisker or a moving smudge of black, then turned around and stuck her hands in her pockets again.

She hadn’t really wanted to come out here, but now that she _was,_ Grace didn’t want to go back inside. The shadowy dustness of the diner and the quiet and the blond killjoy—his name was Kobra Kid, on the posters—who stayed behind when the group went out and carefully not-watched her from behind his sunglasses; all of it was not something that Grace wanted to be around.

 

She walked over to the gas pumps in the front lot. It’d be a thing to do, to try to see if there was actually any fuel in them, but when she got there she realized she had no idea _how_ to check, anyway. It just looked like steel pipes with grime all over them going into grimy ground.  
The air smelled faintly of chemicals. They smelled kind of like when the fabricated winds would blow around from the factory sector of Battery City, when her and her old classmates had been outside during Outdoor Supervised Playtime or Educational Activities In The Environment. (The name had changed when she’d been older.) Grace had never wondered what it was when she’d been in Primary Ed, but she did now.

It didn’t smell like actual guzzoline. She knew how guzzoline stank, and how the smell of it stuck to everything around it for days. The killjoys— _Fabulous Killjoys,_ she reminded herself, _with Capital Letters, they were That Important_ — had a car. It was a bulky thing to begin with that still somehow took more room than she expected it too, every time she saw it. There were things painted all over it: skulls and sharp spikes of lightning marks and a huge, gross spider with jagged knees and a hole in the middle of it that was spread over the hood. Grace guessed that one of the killjoys themselves had painted all of that.

It was, she had to admit, pretty milkshake.

The killjoys themselves were pretty shiny, she thought, kicking idly at the pumps. Shiny car, shiny  hair colours, and narcotic names.

It was weird that they didn’t know her name, but she knew all of theirs. Grace frowned down at the dust, wiping her hair out of her face.

It wasn’t a safe feeling anymore, nobody knowing her name but her, but she thought that she would keep it that way for now anyway. She couldn’t carry the last name she’d used with her. It was the junk punks’ more than it had been hers, and she didn’t have them anymore.  
It was like the bad luck beads that all the junk punks had worn, and even two of the killjoys seemed to. Wear bad luck so you know where it is, and you’re never surprised. Keep something someone gave you safe, the person you got it from would be safe.

 

Or that was the idea. Grace looked up at the sky, ignoring the stinging in her eyes, and then roughly wiped off her face on her jacket sleeve. “It’s boring out here,” she mumbled, turning around to finally head back inside.

 

Kobra Kid barely looked up from his magazine when she came in.

It sparked anger behind her eyes, and without even knowing why Grace had curled her hands into fists. None of them _talked_ to her. It was just like last time! Sure the Fabulous killjoys didn’t go out waveheading or dancing as much as the junk punks had, but still, they left their base for longer than Grace thought really made sense. And she was always behind. They left Jet Star or Kobra with her sometimes, but they didn’t even really look at her much after she’d not said anything. She could’ve planted _bombs,_ for all they knew. She totally could have been a plant. Or a spy, like one of the spy flies from the City that she could’ve kept in her bag with her, or tucked up hidden under the front of her shirt. No one had even asked her any questions.

“You know I could’ve wrecked this place by now, if I felt like it,” she blurted, still standing in the doorway.  
Kobra just raised his eyebrows at her over his sunglasses. “Yeah?” He said.  
“Yeah.” She stood, feeling like she should have brought something to demonstrate her totally-being capable of destruction. Instead she just stuck her chin in the air. “ _Yeah,_ ” she repeated, more sharply. “I could totally be a plant.”  
“You could,” he agreed. He kept on turning the weird glossy pages of half-undressed androids, and eventually Grace walked off in disgust.    


 

Kobra must have told the others after that. There was no way he didn’t. But they still _left her there,_ all the time.

  
Grace only thought of later that the reason Poison and Jet Star and the long-black-hair sunshine—Fun Ghoul—left her alone with Kobra Kid so much was because they were pretty sure that whatever she said, he’d be able to deal with. They actually, honestly didn’t think she could be a problem.

And she didn’t _want_ to be, not really. She didn’t want to blow up the place or anything that she said she could. She didn’t even want to bug Kobra, really; he was kind of glitchy sometimes, but he’d been the one who’d patched up her feet when they didn’t even know who she was. She didn’t want to bother any of them.  
She just wanted...  


 

She kept exploring around the diner during the day, skulking sometimes. Since no one ever talked to her, she was never sure if there was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be. The others usually came back at night, so at least she had warning courtesy of the blazing traffic light in the sky. Grace made sure to be out of the garage or parking lot or the endless scrubland behind the diner by the time the shadows got long on the ground.  
She could hear them coming back too which also helped. They had a radio in the Am. Not the two-way kind that Kobra Kid had been pecking at with his fingers when he’d first asked Grace if she’d been the one to knock out the creepy Shark Teeth sunshine at the mall fair. A speaker kind, that actually picked up general signals and spat them back out. Whenever Poison was driving (Poison was always driving) they would leave the windows down, and she’d be able to hear the DJ they were listening to before she even saw the whole of the car.  

She didn’t know how she felt about the crew, or the place, or being there with them. She liked the music flowing out from their speakers at night, though. It made her feel good to hear it. Even the uglier sounds.  


*  


Climbing became her new favourite thing to do when she felt like moving. She missed the tree outside Murder City, but the diner had its own places. The counter, for one thing. The pumps themselves outside had weird hooks and curved bars that Grace might actually be brave enough to put her feet and haul herself up on, one day. Her favourite climbing spot’s the metal tank on the right side of the diner, though. It’s easiest, and sometimes she caught sight of the cat up there, just for a second.

 

The second or third time she had made it to the top of the tank in less than a minute, she sat at the top for a few seconds, just enjoying the wind in her hair. No cat today, though.

She looked over her shoulder at the ground when she was getting ready to climb back down, and there was Kobra Kid. He had his hands in his jeans’ pockets and was staring up at her through his ever present sunglasses. They looked even more like fly-eyes than usual, dark and clear in his otherwise dust-covered face. “What’re you doing up there, roadgoblin?” He called. His voice always sounded kinda different than she thought it’d be. Higher, a little.  
Grace wondered how long he’d been watching her. And then wondered whether or not she should say something to his question. “Nothin’,” she called down a little defensively.  


She jumped the last couple of feet to the ground, landing on her feet and letting the impact roll down her knees. Then she stood, looking up at him. “What’re you doing down here?”  
A corner of his mouth turned up. He did that a lot and she wasn’t sure if he was making fun of her or not. “Wondering where you scurry off to when you hoof it around, s’all,” he said.  
“The others ask you about me?” She asked, kind of accusingly.  
He didn’t so much as move. Maybe he blinked, under his fly glasses. “No one’s asking me anything ‘bout you,” he said. “You expecting someone to?”  
That was a first. Grace hadn’t meant for the “I’m a spy” idea to _work_. “ _No,_ that’s stupid.”  
“Alright, roadgoblin,” Kobra said. He took one of his hands out of his pocket and held it up placatingly. He waved it for a second, then stuck it back in the side of his jeans. He wasn’t wearing the bright lead-red Pegasus jacket he was usually glued inside. But then, it was ridiculously boiling out. “Do have a question for you, though, to be crystal,” he said.  
“What?” Grace meant ‘what do you have to ask me’, but she thought he’d figure that out.  
“Why do you not want to go swapping for new feathers?” He nodded at her clothes. “We said we’d help you. Those don’t fit and they’re all scrapped up.”  
“They’re still _mine,_ ” Grace blurted. She pulled her jacket tighter around her waist defensively, having taken it off to climb. “I don’t need any new ones.”  
“It’s not about needing stuff, ro-”  
“I don’t _want_ any new ones either, then,” Grace sniped. There were only a couple things she really needed. “But where’s my knife?” she asked out loud, as sharp as she thought made sense.

“Can’t tell you that, roadgoblin,” Kobra said.

Grace scowled. “Well why not? I can take care of myself. It’s not like I can’t use them.”

“You could blast this place to the ground if you wanted to,” Kobra parroted. He didn’t quite actually break the even tone that he usually had, but he still sounded like he was poking fun of her. “You could totally be a plant in a person suit. A plant can find her own extra weapon no problem, if the first one goes sideways-up,” Kobra said. “It’s barely even a question of waiting.”  
Okay, now he was _definitely_ making fun of her. She squinted at him. “What are you waiting for?” She accused. “That doesn’t make sense. You’re playing word games.”  
Kobra grinned. “My words are as gamey as yours,” he said.  
Grace crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m not apologizing,” she said.  


Kobra actually gave a short, quick laugh at that; his shoulders jerked like he’d hiccupped and he put one of his hands over his mouth briefly.  
It was the first time she’d ever seen him laugh. Grace blinked a little. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing that a Fabulous Killjoy would do.  
“Not asking for you to,” Kobra said after he’d wiped under his nose and put his hands down. “Asking for you to come road-spiking with us.”  
“What?”  
“Next time we go onto the road, you bring yourself along,” Kobra explained. He shifted to mirror her pose, with the crossed arms. “We see what you’re made of, plant-matter or not.”  
Grace stuck her chin out. “I’m not getting rid of my coat.”

“You can stick with those if you want, motorgoblin,” he said. “Just be out on the road with us when we gotta run.”  
“So you’ll know if I’m a City camera or not.”  
Kobra nodded.  
She hadn’t actually thought he’d say yes. It threw her off for a second. “Wait-- if I go, you’ll give me back my blaster?” She tossed out experimentally.  
Kobra shrugged. “Not saying we wouldn’t,” he said.  
  
Grace chewed on the inside of her cheek for a minute.

“Fine,” she said. She meant it as abruptly as she could, and she hoped that it came across that way. It sounded pretty okay to her as she dropped her arms. “Next run.”  
Kobra lowered his arms too, nodded slowly. “Listen, though, roadgoblin.”  
Grace paused, looking up like she could see a sound in the air.  
“Negative— I meant, listen, we’re gonna get fried like airwaves if we stick out here for too much longer,” Kobra said, from in front of her, while she watched some dust-whirls swirl over a slow bit of sky.  
“Oh,” she said, looking down again. “I could’ve said _that._ ”  
   


When they were inside Grace went to the only place in the diner that was hers, and pulled out Gear, wanting to tell the robot how she’d climbed the side of the tank.  Kobra cleared his throat, though, so she looked over at him.

He was standing at the counter, using it as a backrest. “What were you doing up there?” Kobra Kid asked again.  
Grace paused. Asking someone twice meant you were serious, most times. She looked at the robot in her hand, moving its left blue hand to touch its foot and then turn a slow cartwheel. “There’s a—a cat that sleeps up there,” she said. “On the top of the tank, in this little pipe square. I saw it once, I want to see if it’ll come back. So I check when I go out there. But it hasn’t yet.” She looked back up at Kobra.  
He was looking at her intently. He nodded. There was something in his hands he was fidgeting with—a bundle of wood slivers, it looked like, or a matchbook. He tipped the pieces onto the counter and started sorting them into groups with quick flicks of his fingers.  
Grace breathed out, relaxing a little. Whatever the question was for, it wasn't a big deal. “So… what were _you_ doing down here?” She asked back.  
“Oh, y’know, there’s a motorkid that climbs up there,” Kobra answered offhand. “I see her all the time. Wanted to see if she’d come down.”

  
-


	4. Scavenge Monsters

  
Kobra Kid must have told the others that she had said yes to going with them on the feathering run _if_ they didn’t say she’d have to throw out her white jacket and jeans. The three other Fabulous Killjoys come back wooping and laughing that night, and they’re sullen in the morning in a way she remembered from her junk punks’ post-Glimmer morning days, but by near-mid day they’re starting to function like humans again. When he’d finally stopped feeling sick, she guessed, Fun Ghoul went over to where Grace had been sitting on the floor looking at all of the things on the underside of the table. He crouched down and looked at her for a second.  
She looked back over at him, tilting her head against the back of the bench. “There’s a lot of weird coloured stuff under here,” she said, feeling like she might as well break the silence (between them, not in the diner itself) first. Ghoul hadn’t talked to her before. She wondered, curiously, why he was starting to now.  
“That’d be the gumchew,” Ghoul said, flashing a grin. He sat down on the ground but didn’t actually join her under the table.  
Grace would’ve bolted if he did. As it was, she pulled her feet up from where she’d been relaxing and budged over so she was sitting facing towards him. She waited for him to say something.  
“Snakeface told that you’re gonna hitch a ride with us to the dumpster,” Ghoul said. “That true?”  
“I’m gonna be along for the road,” she said. She hadn’t thought that the Fabulous Killjoys would go to the dump to trade for clothes. She wasn’t sure where else they would’ve gone; to a proper swap-meet, she guessed. But maybe there weren’t any of those around this part of the Zone. Where was she even in, in the Zones? Grace realized abruptly she had no idea. _Jesus,_ she thought. It was something Mama had said.  
Fun Ghoul nodded anyway. “Milkshake, motorbaby,” he said. “You’ll get the backseats with us in the Am. But move on quick-like, we’re moving out soon.”  
“Backseats with you and who?” Grace asked. She reached beside her for her messenger bag, then paused. But no, she couldn’t just leave it here. She hauled the strap over her shoulder and then waited, making a weird little head nod she wouldn’t be able to explain later to indicate that the adult killjoy should move to let her pass by.  
Fun Ghoul did, keeping talking while she crab-walked out with her bag (and entire life) in tow. “Me and Jet Star,” he said. “Poison’s on wheel duty this time and Kobra takes sideseat, so, we’re all in the back bench. Gonna be a bunch of sardines,” he said cheerfully.  
Grace had no idea what sardines were. She nodded anyway.

  
It turned out “sardines” meant “really, really squished in”. The boxy car with its beautiful if gross paintings was even boxier and weirder on the inside. It smelled kind of gross; a different kind of gross, she thought, than the junk punk’s van had. Like road sweat and sour something and alc still, but less like the paint-face that the girls in Grace’s old crew had favoured, and less the sweet smell of mouthbursters that Violet and Burn had both favoured in liquid or chewing forms. It also neccesarily smelled like the Fabulous Killjoys and whatever it was they had drank or popped the night (or multiple nights) before. It seemed awful small to fit all four of them plus her, once she saw the inside, but Zone cars seemed to run small anyway. She heaved her bag onto the seat in front of her and then clambered in.  
Jet Star sat against the window, behind Kobra, like both of their tall legs somehow cancelled each other out in a way that was comfortable. Fun Ghoul took the other side window, propping his head up on his arm as soon as they were inside like he was already tired and bored of the whole thing, even though none of them had even said anything and Poison hadn’t started driving yet. Stuck in the middle of them, Grace had enough room to move her elbows if she kept them close to the sides of her jacket and enough room to put her feet all the way out to begin with. She kept her arms where they were, though, around the messenger bag that she hugged to her lap. She kept her legs folded underneath her, too. Poison and Kobra got in at the same time, slamming both their doors so the combined sound made Grace’s head ring. “Seatbelts!” Poison called out, slamming his sunblocker-slide down with more force than Grace guessed was needed.  
Jet Star and Fun Ghoul strapped in on either side of her. Grace looked down, confused, until she felt behind her and pulled out a thin lap strap that was faded completely to non-colour on one side. It still plugged in properly, though, and she decided to be thankful for that. Hopefully it wouldn’t snap. Probably.  
Kobra Kid craned his skinny neck around the edge of his chair and then nodded at all of them. He was wearing his fly glasses lower on his nose than usual so Grace could see his eyes; they were a murky kind of green. They flicked from Ghoul to her, and couldn’t reach Jet Star around the chair. He nodded and turned back to the front, adding, “Hit it.”  
_That’s kind of silly,_ Grace thought, and then Poison backed out of the garage very, very quickly like he’d hit the gas pedal as hard as he could.

Once she’d recovered from the probably-whiplash, Grace held onto her messenger bag like it would help stabilize the ride for her even though she knew it probably wouldn’t. She was grateful for the seatbelt, flimsy though it was. She put out her elbows, a little, digging them into the material behind her more than anything else.

She still felt the two sunshine’s arms beside her… which wasn’t actually a bad thing. Grace was a little surprised to realize that. But it was fine: neither of the sunshines seemed super interested in whether she was avoiding their entire existence in the car or not. And she’d missed being around other people like this; ever since-- well, Hope always clung to her, even when she was sick, and none of the junk punks had really been off-put by snuggling or cramming bodies into small hiding spaces or vehicles. She thought that the whole however-long she’d been sick and walking, and then when she’d been in the Diner and right outside it, it was the longest time she’d been without someone else around to lean into or lie on or--as she leaned sideways into a turn that Poison took— fortify against from crazy turns in cars.  
It was kind of nice. They were warm on either side of her, and it felt kind of like… well, like the long memories of long roads with the junk punks and her sister at her sides.

She closed her eyes. There was something else hovering way in the back of her brain, like a rad-bird that was floating on the waves up in the cloudsphere. A memory. She would’ve been little, incredibly little, and she’d been in the car with her mama and her dad. She’d probably called him ‘papa’ when she’d been that young. It was hot out but all of the windows had been rolled up, she’d been in a booster seat, looking outside the window on her left side; watching the sides of the road glow, far away through the night. There hadn’t been any outside noise except for the hum of the engine, and someone ahead of her talking. Their voices were a soft adult murmur; mutable and not meant for her, anyway. She didn’t have to worry. Both of them were taking her somewhere, they would tell her when they were all stopping and they all knew where to go.

 

  
A blare of noise made Grace’s eyes pop open like she’d stepped on glass.

 

The light filtering in through the windows spun her head for a minute, but then reality reset. It wasn’t night time, she was ten. Right. She re-adjusted her hold on the bag in her lap, which had slipped a little, and then tried to look over her shoulder to both sides to see if any of them had actually noticed her micro-nap, or memory slip, or whatever that had been.  
No such luck, though. Jet Star was looking at her with a bit of a smile on his face, but he looked away quick when she caught his actual eyesight. (He did that often when he was the one watching the diner and her path, too. Maybe he still thought she was afraid of him from when she’d woke up.)  
Fun Ghoul was giving her a weird look on the other side of her, like he thought _she_ was the one being weird. “What’s shaking you, roadgoblin?” He asked when she looked over at his door. “Never heard Math before?”  
Grace narrowed her eyebrows at him. “You don’t hear math,” she said, confused. “You see it. Or do it.” Ghoul was making fun of her, but he wasn’t making sense.  
Ghoul laughed. “Kobra does and sees math,” he said, pointing one (drawing-covered) hand over at the sideseat, to a non-responsive blonde killjoy. “But you and the rest of us, we’re hearing it. Open up your ears!”  
And—oh, right, Grace realized. The music. _Wow.  
_ She tried not to look too impressed, just in case, but it appeared that she failed that particular try. Ghoul’s grin got huge and cheeky and he unbuckled his seat belt, leaning up and around to talk right into Poison’s ear. His jeans hung flatly off his butt from where he was precariously balanced. Grace snorted, amused, for the second before Ghoul dropped himself back down and, abruptly, the music became louder.  
It was a weird song, but she liked it, she guessed. So fast her head almost blurred from listening to all of it; she couldn’t even catch all the words. But she thought that was kind of the point. They kept saying, _This is the time!_ And the swirly parts sounded like—like the computers in Primary Ed did when one of the students got a wrong answer to a question, that gently reprimanding chime they had, except like if all of the computers had gone crazy at once. But the song’s were more high-pitched. Like bird songs, maybe, if she’d ever heard a bird that sang instead of squawked. She found herself nodding her head along to the faster parts even without meaning too.  
On her right side Jet Star was tapping his hands on his leg, both of them in really specific patterns that went along with the song. He was smiling out the window, bobbing his head on the beats.  
_I wonder if he plays this song on his guitar,_ Grace thought. That was another thing she’d have to figure out at some point. Or she could just ask him, but she kind of didin’t want to talk to them too much. Her voice was starting to get sore from already saying what she’d already said today.  
  
Then the song ended in a huge crash, like a bunch of cymbals falling down a hill or a long steep drive all at once.  
Beside her, Ghoul laughed out loud again. On her other side, the right-hand side, Jet threw his head around extra hard, curls flying all over the place.  
Grace couldn’t actually help but grin when she looked over at him. She’d never—like, she hadn’t looked at herself in the mirror for a long time now because, well, everything, but she hadn’t seen anyone with curly hair like hers for a long time. Hers mostly puffed out while his grew out and then down, but still. It was pretty great.  
There was a slight squeak in the broadcast and then a voice was spilling through instead of music: “Alright all you rock and rollers out there, that was ‘Stay Real’, in paranthesis ‘Sock It To Me, _Satan_ ’, by all our old friends in the firelake, Math The Band. I haven’t heard keyboards that wild since… well, since that old hive factory of typists out in the north part of Old Chicago went sky-high in the stock market. Stranger days, children. Stranger days.”

The voice grated and ran out of the radio, like smoke. Grace couldn’t tell if she’d ever heard it before. She felt like she must have; maybe, somewhere.

“Oh but uh, bad news from the badlands, sugarshines. Speaking of hives, we lost a couple of good worker bees in a Draculoid raid this last moonset. Over here at the station we’d just like to put our hands into our irradiated little hearts, and offer out a sad sorry to the crew and mates of Susannah Sunshine and Meghon Burst. They were good, good, and now they’re gone. It’s WKIL’s, uh, official position that all seekers get to where they’re goin’, in the end, and it’s a little timebombs truth that it’s the same for those two spikeshots wherever their dust rests.  
“But in the meantime, tumbleweeds, how about we let us bring it on up again with a little bounce rocks, huh? Oh— wait, wait. My local ladyboy’s signalling me around the station, here. So we’re gonna bounce a bit later; while we wait for the skies a little to clear here is the traffic. This is Doctor Death-Defying, singing out to you from _WKIL._ ”  
  
The radio pirate’s voice sizzled to a stop, grinding out on the last word like someone grinding out a cigarette. The station crossed over into static and loud whining sirens while Grace watched through the gap in the front seats with wide eyes.  
Kobra grumbled something inaudible to himself, leaning forward and hitting the dashboard right above the radio with the side part of his hand while he made a fist. He didn’t super-chunk it or anything, but it still jolted enough to rattle the MouseKat head-charm that hung from a thin cheap looking piece of metal string from the rearview.  
“Mind the tech,” Poison said, glancing sideways at Kobra with a kind of glare.  
Kobra just shrugged with the one shoulder that Grace could see, leaned back into the back of his seat. “Worked,” he said in reply.  
And it seemed to have: the station was still staticky, and the DJ hadn’t come back yet, but the weird siren wails had stopped and there was just the kind of low-level static that Grace, at least, had become used to in the desert.  
“Why does the static sound like that,” she wondered; and she didn’t realize that she’d spoke out loud until she saw that Poison hadn’t responded to Kobra’s jab. She wondered with a little bit of panic if she had inadvertently said something wrong, but then, there wasn’t anything wrong with asking a question, right? Not— what she had said wasn’t anything like asking the creep in the Sparkle Hive asking why all the people were packing up so quick; or whatever it had been, she didn’t even remember anymore, only remembered the crack of cartilage under her knuckles. And the junk punks rallying around and Hope, which she didn’t want to think about right now. She stuck her chin out and resolutely did not squish down into the seats more or anything.  
“Nobody really knows, motorbaby,” Jet Star spoke up. He sounded like he was being careful with his word choice. “That’s just how it sounds.”  
That was about what she’d thought. She nodded, not too sure what else to do. “Alright,” she said.  
  
There was a moment of silence except for the wheels on the road.

 

Something jostled her side a little from her left. She looked over to see Fun Ghoul looking at her weird again. His brown-ish eyes were all sparkly and he had his head tilted kind of like a bird, a sand-gull when it’d seen something sparkly in the dunes. He didn’t say anything, though.

“Yeah?” She said, trying not to sound like she was either curious or weirded out. She tried to make it sound like a challenge.  
“Do you wanna see something cool, motorkid?”  
Grace wondered if the killjoy would leave her alone if she said no. But then they’d left her alone, basically, for days on end. “No,” she said, deciding to try it anyway.  
Fun Ghoul’s face twisted up. He looked a little surprised, and a little unhappy, like Hope had sometimes; that was, he looked like Hope had sometimes when she’d been a little surprised and unhappy. But not, like, actually sad. “Oh. Well why not?” He asked, pointedly.

Grace didn’t really have a reason. She looked forward out of what she could see out of the windshield. The car was low to the ground; Fun Ghoul had called it the Am right before they’d got into it, she remembered. She didn’t know what that meant, but maybe it was that all these kinds of cars were low to the ground. All she could see was the front level of the dashboard and the reflected sunlight through it, and the mostly blue but partially greyish cloud sky in front of them. It seemed washed-out, the blue, like Jet Star’s t-shirt with the star and the lightninig strike that he wore sometimes under his leathery jacket. It was pretty boring, she had to admit. And ever since the last spark of the radio pirate Doctor Death-Defying’s voice had faded out, nothing interesting had floated back out through the radio. She looked down at her own crossed feet. They were a little boring, too. Normally she wouldn’t’ve said anything, but, she was sort of curious now that he’d mentioned it.

Shrugging, Grace looked back at him. “Changed my mind,” she said. “What’s it?”  
Fun Ghoul grinned again, then, and shifted around so he was facing the window. He shoved the strap of the seatbelt that went across your chest back to the back of the seat and then wriggled until the part of the seatbelt that went across your lap was stretched all weird and past any usefulness.  
“Careful you don’t break your hip,” Jet Star said from behind where Grace was looking, a little bemused.

“Whatever, fossil face,” Fun Ghoul said over his shoulder, and then with a couple of quick movements he’d shucked off the mottled green vest he had on and the long-sleeved black and yellow shirt he wore underneath it. “What’d d’you see?”  
Grace blinked. “Shiny!” She blurted, before she could think of anything else to say. “What are they?”  
Ghoul laughed; it was a cool laugh, too, kind of like Kobra’s except it had more notes. “Tattoos,” he said.  
"I know  _that_ ," Grace said; she'd seen tattoos before. "I mean, what're they of?"

"Oh." Ghoul sat up a little more, so that Grace could more clearly see all of the _stuff_ he had drawn all over his back, right up to the top hem of his grey pants and greyer underpants.  
The sunshine had tattoos of things that Grace didn’t even know words for. An orange circle with evil faces carved into it. Some weird angles and curves that didn’t seem to make up anything except for a maze with more angles and curves, all in dark colours. Some of the other drawings made sense to her though: there were guns, two of them that didn’t have any colour except for the white-ruddiness of Ghoul’s skin; and what looked like a shooting star, like a five-point full shape with waves of sound and movement behind it. They curved around a skeleton that went up pretty much the entire way up his back, the star fitting into its ribcage, where, Grace remembered from her Biology Ed classes, a heart and lungs and guts stuff should have been.

There were words, too, in spiky letters as thick as the side of Grace’s hand; “Keep the faith,” she read out loud. That one was right up by his neck, above the orange circle (which was above the weird maze of lines). And another one, below it, in the middle of his back where a soft spot would be, written in a weird start-stop pattern in colour that she thought was blood at first. “Violence is an energy,” she read it out loud too.  
That sounded like something; she frowned a little. “That’s a nobodyface noise,” she said.

“’s from the City, yeah,” Ghoul replied, mostly to the window. He paused for a second as the car took a sudden dip and jostle (Party swore in the front seat), and then used the closed window as leverage for turning around. “It’s a thing,” he started as he turned around, and then stopped and grinned again.  
“I didn't know you had  _more,_ ” Grace said, which was why the Killjoy had grinned, of course. There was one stretched across his shoulders like a jacket, and they even went down both of the lower parts of his arms like jackets’ sleeves. The one across his shoulders was more like a scarf, though, or the weird kind of half-jackets that Burn had used to wear sometimes, because it went in front of his neck along with covering both of his shoulders. It was all in the same dark colour as the lines, and it looked _pretty,_ all woven together _._ Grace had never seen anything like it before. “Who drew all of them?” She asked, trying to figure out the loops and bends.  
“Friends, mostly,” he said easily. “Twice-done crewmates sometimes.”

  
Grace nodded. She was looking at Ghoul’s belly now. Along with the guns on his lower back, in the same general place, he also had two outlines of birds right under his belly button, with their little bird eyes crossed out like on WANTED posters and how Runners did their drawings of people or critters who had died. They bracketed the huge “And” that was written in the same sort of spikey letters as the things on Ghoul’s back had been. It was a little harder to read it because it and the birds were sparsely covered with the wiry hairs that covered his belly and poked out of the tops of his underpants, but Grace could read it anyway. “Why is it ‘And’?” She asked, pointing.  
“It’s a sentence,” Ghoul explained. He twisted his torso a little until it showed more of his hip. He pointed to the word that was written there, and the beginning curve of one of the guns that had been on his back (the handle reached around to the side of his torso). “Search,” he said. Then he turned forward towards her normally again, gestured to the ‘And’ without another explanation, and then wriggled a little more so he was facing the backseat and window, and Grace could see his right hip. “Destroy,” Ghoul said, craning his neck around to see if he could see it. He was balancing on one knee on the seat, the seatbelt basically just under the bendy part of his leg.  
Grace hoped that Poison didn’t have to break real sudden; she didn’t know if she’d be able to catch Ghoul in time, and she was the only one closest to him to be able to. “Search and destroy,” she repeated, so he’d know that she got it.      
“Pository.” Ghoul spun around and sat back down with a _flump,_ his back skin making a weird squeaky noise on the seat’s material. He pulled the seatbelt back across him properly (Grace relaxed a little), then scratched the back of his head with his left hand and then inspected whatever had shown up under his fingernail, before looking at Grace again and nodding at her. “It’s another nobodyface thing,” he said. “But it applies to us too, crystal? If they find us. Or we find _them._ ” He made a gun out of his hand and pointed it towards the front window, miming blowing off a blast. “Run fast.”  
“Hide well,” Grace finished, almost automatically.

Sadness spiked through her, but she pushed it away as best she could; focusing on the tiny letters on Ghoul’s hand where he was still holding the hand-blaster up. “What about those?”

“These?” He held his hands out like he was making handprints in paint in the dust or concrete. “Oh, these.” She could see the words on his knuckles clearer, but it didn’t make anymore sense. Until, that was, he knitted his hands together like he was making one huge fist, and then held it up for her to see.  
“Killjoye,” she read out loud, written in small dark green block letters. She’d seen the word on the backs of jackets at fairs before; usually it ended at the ‘why’. She pronounced the ‘e’ like it was a addition, like Emee’s first name. She smiled a little. “That ones milkshake,” she said, looking over at Ghoul’s face. “It makes the joy sound bigger.”  
Ghoul smiled back at her. “That’s the idea,” he said. He tilted his hand-bundle to look at it himself, then rotated his arms so that she could see where his left thumb was curled into the fist. “You want to know about this one?” He asked, nodding at his thumb. There was a stripe on it that was a different white than the rest of his skin. Paler, and it looked more raised, like an extra puffy layer was carefully pasted over that part of his hand.     
“… yeah? What is it?” Grace asked, shifting on her own seat again to try and crane her head to see it better.  
“It’s a warning,” Ghoul said. He lowered his hands again so Grace could see the whiter part. “It tells nobody to fuck with me.”

 

“I don’t see anything,” she said, confused. Her eyes narrowed a little. “You’re—”  
“’s not a trick, motorgoblin,” Ghoul said quickly. He unfurled his hand and then shook them out, saying offhand, “Getting tight. Anyway, I used to have something there. It was a bunch of letters, you know? Yeah you know letters, you were just readin’.” He shook his head like he was clearing sand out of a boot. “Anyway, they were all the letters. In English, anyway. You know what English is?”  
“Yeah,” Grace said, insulted. Of course she did. English was Primary Ed’s primary language for children in her sector of the City. If she’d stayed in the system she would have learned how to speak Kanto Japanese the next terms. Only actual _babies_ didn’t know what English was.  
Ghoul nodded at her again, and his smile flickered for a second like a cloud had passed over his face from the inside. “Milkshake. So, I had all of the English letters up the side of this hands, right. And then I went to a bash over down on the hills, ‘cause someone said someone else’d sung that there’d be drawing needles there, and the colourful bits. And I like adding ‘em whenever I can,” he said, then gestured to himself with a flourish of both hands. “As you can see.”  
“We can see too much, smokehead,” Jet Star said dryly.  
Grace startles a little, looking over her shoulder. She’d pretty much forgotten that the rest of the car was there; all of the hum and clanking of it had faded into the background, even as she adjusted to the turns automatically. Jet Star is looking out his window, Grace thinks exaggeratedly holding up a hand over the side of his face to hide his eyes.  
“Yeah, you’re stinking up the goddamn place,” Kobra said from the front side seat, his voice floating back over to them.

Ghoul briefly double-flipped the two of his crewmates the one-fingered salute, then turned to Grace again, keeping staying in the seat this time though; now that Grace was more aware of it, the car was jostling a fair bit. “So I go to the hills for these colour-needs,” he continued, “Right, and I get there, and there’s these four people. They look like—well, they’ve got needles, but they’re not the colouring kind, they’re for stitching and fixing up. Or tearing up. And they’ve all got _knives,_ see?” He gestured with his hand non-specififcally, nodding seriously when Grace’s eyes got big. “Turned out whoever made up the thing was strung out a mile long, and whoever’d passed the info out was a goon or a junkie or both. The motherfuckers wanted to cut up and paste on _people’s skin._ ”  
“No!” Grace said, her voice blanking out. She felt her face blink up, wrenched over somehow in her disgust. And weirdly, she wanted to laugh at the thought of it. Skinrippers that actually, legit _ripped skin._ And then sewed it on in other places.  
“No, for real!” Ghoul was laughing now, making weird sweeping motions with one of his hands onto the other, “Just slice it right off! Like you’d take off the top of a snake. If you eat them,” he added. “So they tried on me, right, four or five of these blankeyed waveheads just pile on me at the same time. And it’s pants-shitting, right, like this is a horrible thing and I’m just blank-headed like them, except ‘cause I’m fucking scared, right? Not high ‘cept for the blood juice that makes you run.”  
Grace found herself nodding, memories of the Sparkle Hive flashing through her head, again and always; and before that, in the car hospital, with Mama and her falling shadow and the unwavering light. _Right._ _Right._ “What did you do?” She blurted, thinking of crunches and heaviness at the end of her fist.  
“Bit ‘em.” Ghoul flashed his teeth again. “Right in the ear, one of them, which started the rest of them yelling. Which was when these beauties,” he nodded at the car in general, behind Grace; she turned, but Jet Star was still staring out the window and she couldn’t see the other two too well, so she turned back. “Rolled in. They were waitin’ outside ‘cause I’d said I’d wanted to check this place out, and you never go any fucking where in the Zones without an extra pair of eyes.”  
Grace nodded. She knew _that,_ she wanted to say, but she didn’t want Ghoul to stop the story. “Then what happened?”

“Well,” Ghoul said. He folded his hands together like he was going to give someone a leg-up, but instead just lay them palm-flat on his chest and leaned back onto the seat proper itself again, like he was thinking back to the older better days. “We dusted all of them,” he said. He was grinning a little, still, but it’d turned just a bit sour. Grace found herself nodding still. Ghoul continued, “Just blasted their brains out onto the scrub and concrete. One of the bastards with the knives took something with him, though.” Ghoul waved his scarred hand around and then put it back onto his chest, interlacing his fingers again. “s’ wasn’t as bad as it looks now, then, just thought it’d be a small scratch and maybe you could still see the ends a’ the letters on good day, but we didn’t get medspits on it fast enough so the blood got all goopy and gross. We ended up going to a medjoy--- you know those, yeah?”  
“Not personally,” Grace said. She shifted on her seat, trying to get more comfy. “Know _of_ some, I guess.”  
“Good,” Ghoul replied, “That’s all I was really askin’. Anyway, we ended up going to one of them people for it, and they had to cut off more of my letter-mark. I was kinda shot down about it, but, said it was that or my whole arm in a while, so.” He made a teeter-totter gesture with his shoulders. “And then we got it covered in some actual honest to fuck clean bandages, and a month or so later,” he lifted his scarred hand and flourished it again. He glanced sideways at Grace’s still-wide eyes, and nodded in acknowledgement. “So it’s a warning,” he finished. “Someone nobodies off their mind on homebodied-meds tried to fuck with me, and now they’re all bones in the dirt. Every time I look at this hand, I see that.” He re-laced his fingers again.

 

“… every time?” Grace asked. She was looking at him, but she was also feeling her own hand without thinking about it much. Just running her left hand over her right’s, feeling the joints in her wrist where her hand swelled.  
Ghoul glanced at her hands and then quick to her face, looking… concerned, Grace was pretty sure. But as soon as he saw her watching he pasted a smile back on, like Jet Star always looked fast away. “Nah, negatory,” he said, “Not _all_ the time. It barely regosters, actually, ‘cept when I’m telling it. That’d take up way too much space in here--” He tapped his own forehead. “Not enough space in there as it is!”  
Grace snickered a little. She pulled both of her hands back into their sleeves again, in her jacket. (It really _was_ a little too small for her.)  
“So.” Ghoul spread his hands out.  
He _moved_ a lot when he talked; a lot more than Kobra, anyway, at least before, and she hadn’t seen either of the other two Fabulous killjoys talk much. Maybe they all moved like that when they were telling a story. Grace kind of doubted it somehow, though. The junk punks must have moved a lot like that.  
“So, what do you think of that, motorbaby?”  
“Wicked,” she said, blinking back into the _here now_ of the moving Am car. She looked at the jacket piece on Ghoul’s chest again. “… you said _needles_ put that there?” She asked, just to be sure.  
“Yep. Needles and ink.” He paused, shrugging. “They didn’t hurt too bad. These ones were the worst,” he flexed his fingers again. “’Cause it’s right on the bone shards. If you have a lot of skin it’s not too bad.”  
“Oh.” Grace said. “I always thought they were drawn on. Like, with--” Ghoul was looking at her with his eyebrows up near his dark messy hair. “—with markers, or something. I was gonna tell you it must take a long time.” She felt very stupid, abruptly, and snapped her mouth shut.  
“Nope,” Ghoul said, shrugging. He smiled at her, gently enough that she guessed he was trying to make her feel better for being so stupid. “’s not stupid, roadgoblin, don’t be saying that about yourself.”  
Grace hadn’t realized she’d said it out loud. “I didn’t say that?”  
“No, no, just I kinda got it. You’ve got a look in your eye,” he said. “Anyway. Don’t worry yourself through over it, people think stuff like that all the time.” He paused, putting his thumb under his chin. “When I was a youngling like you I thought they just grew on people,” he said. “Like flowers.”  
“That would be pretty,” Grace said, surprised at the picture in her head. Someone—Black Card?--- had had pretty pictures like that; she could totally see them growing across his forearms. Blooming, that was the flower-word. Nova and Plasma had had some pretty tattoos, too. They would have whole gardens. She wondered, abruptly, how the two sugarspices were doing, and all the younglings they looked after for a few learning hours every day too. She hoped they were safe.  
“Milkshake,” Ghoul confirmed.  
“Soured,” Poison said from the front seat.

 

Just then there was a squeal of breaks, and all three of Ghoul and Grace and Jet Star leaned forward against their seatbelts for a second before falling back with three thuds. Somethng clicked, and Poison turned around in the front seat, leaning into the open air in the middle on the side of his hip. “Put on your goddamn leathers, monsterface. We’re here.”  
“And you stink enough as it is,” Kobra mumbled. From the sounds of it he’d already unbuckled himself and was snapping his gun’s batteries into place.  
Grace felt a little cold, despite the sticking heat. She knew that sound really well and it always meant danger, thought-up or not. She missed her blaster.  
“ _You_ stink,” Ghoul was shooting back, but he’d still bent forward into the seat well around his feet and was fishing for his shirt and vest. When he straightened up to put it on he seemed to make extra effort to wave his hairy armpits in Kobra’s direction before the cloth covered them.  
“I _will_ blast you,” Kobra said as deadpan as you could get; he’d turned around in his seat now, too, and was glaring—or probably glaring—at Ghoul over his glasses.  
“Catch me first,” Ghoul said; he had the same look that Petra had said was a shit-eating grin, which Acid had got sometimes.  
  
“Possum,” Jet Star said abruptly. He was sitting up in his seat and leaning more into Grace’s space, which she’d just compressed herself against the back of the seat without thinking about it. “On the twelve. Still in the stacks, but looks like they’ll be out soon.”   
“Shit,” Ghoul muttered, and all of the Fabulous killjoys snapped to attention at the same time.  
  
Poison rolled onto his side, opened the door without straightening up somehow and then rolled outside it, onto his feet. Kobra was right beside him on a mirror, letting his own door swing wide and himself stand up. Jet Star was next out, grabbing for his helmet which was a wide, black-visor thing someone had stuck behind him on the back window’s dash and shutting his door behind him with a swing of his arm. Ghoul was last, pulling his vest on over his shoulders and his gun from the side pocket of the door, into his belt.  
“Stay here, motorbaby,” he said in a hush over his shoulder to her as he scrambled out of the car.   
And then, very suddenly, she was the only one in the car.  
Grace sunk down on the seat again, re-moving her messenger bag in her lap. “Right,” Grace mimicked him to herself grumpily, “ _Stay here._ ” They didn’t know how she fought; what she’d been through. She could handle herself. And it wasn’t like they were giving her oh so much protection. The doors to the Am were wide open on Kobra and Fun Ghoul and Poison's sides. She could hear the sand whistling outside, rustling over itself when the faint wind stirred it. She wrinkled her nose. Whatever the wind was blowing the smell of towards the car, she hoped that it never actually was something she had to be too close to. It _stunk_.  
She stared at the top of the windshield, but all that was outside it was some sky with faint whisps of soft clouds like snow curling slowly over the ground. Pretty but after a while a little boring.  
  
Ghoul’s voice drifts in with the stink from outside, only a slight bit more welcome: “Look, she did something. Did you see how she was rubbing her hand?”  
Jet followed, a little muffled from talking around his helmet; Grace leaned closer to the open car door to hear properly, wondering how she always got stuck listening behind doors. But they were talking _about her,_ she had a right to listen. “Maybe she sprained it somehow,” Jet Star said.  
“Nuh-uh. No way. She rubbed it right after I spat that stuff about memorizing it. Kid, did the motorbaby ever have a problem with it before?”  
Kobra, replying: “Negatory. She climbs all over the place with both hands and feet. Thought she was gonna break her neck.”  
“All of you shut your faces and put your rebreather on,” Poison’s voice floated louder over the others. Or maybe not louder, exactly. Grace had noticed in the days before that Poison’s voice got heard more, in the group; it wasn’t that he talked the most, or that his voice wasn’t shriller or fuller than the others’; there was just more of it whenever he did talk. (None of the junk punks had been like that, in everything except emergencies they had tried to all talk together.) “And Ghoul if you ever pull a stripshow in front of a sandmite again, much less while I’m _driving,_ so help me--”  
“Hey, hey, no one’s stripping anything but paint. Off my _heart,_ Poison,” Ghoul said, seeming mock-upset. “Look, I didn’t mean anything like that by it— and little one’s talking now, ain’t she? You were all in a twist over that the other day. I was doing you a favour.”  
“Doing him an eyeful is what you were,” Kobra again. “And the rest of us. Pretty sure you blinded a couple rad-birds off the highway.”  
“Everyone masks _on,_ ” Poison said again, but this time sharply, and no other voices followed it.  
From where she was listening in the car, Grace instinctively held her own breath. Curiousity pricked along her eyelids so she got up onto her feet inside the car, the better to see the Fabulous Killjoys with.  
  
There were the four of them standing in a line shoulder to shoulder, as she had kind of expected them to be. They waited, while a fifth figure ambled toward them out of a pile of... _stuff_. Garbage, really. It must have some value if people were keepin’ it, but Grace didn't know how else to describe what the huge mounds and piles and pathways out of things were except actual trash.  
She wasn't sure how to describe the fifth person ambling at them through the dust either; she was pretty sure he wasn’t a hallucination, thankfully for Grace and her blood supply (she hadn’t thought she’d taken in any mind-benders, ever, but there was always the possibility that there was something in the smoke). But it didn’t look like they were a particularly friendly person. Maybe it was all the purple paint sprayed like fake blood over the front of their shirt, or the snarling canid-face that their mask hid them to be. The mask looked heavy and made of plastic with a bunch of folds and roll-over layers, like Draculoids masks were, except this one was heavier and the wrong kinds of colours. The nose was long and sharp rubbery teeth extended from a fake-hairy jaw below it, making a permanent snarl of whoever was inside the thing. Their eyes were blocked over with X’s, like the birds on Fun Ghoul’s sparrows, but even without the X’s the weird cartoon character would be scary. Red stuff, fake or real or someone else’s, dripping along their shoulders from where Grace assumed there was a wound of some kind.    
The weird monster-masked killjoy ambled closer to the others, taking their time.  
Grace sunk herself back down onto the seat, and then after a second of thought into the seat well in front of her instead of just sitting on the seat by itself, which wouldn’t be any camoflauge at all if someone came around the side of the open doors. She didn’t have a blaster but if she did, she’d be fine by herself. She _would._ It was infuriating being treated like a little kid again—after everything that Petra and the others had saw her through, on top of it. Like, she knew she could just tell them. But she sure as spit wasn’t going to do that right now, with someone with a--- a _wolf_ mask about to knock down the door.  
Not down, she corrected herself, adjusting her feet on the well. Just… in. She can’t hear the killjoys talking to the—Possum, Jet Star had said? Possum. But she could hear the killjoys replying to them, Party Poison doing most of the talking. He didn’t do it sharp and mean like Petra and Burn had when they were swapping for stuff. Grace wondered if he was talking fast and smoothly because he didn’t want the Possum to look too far behind him and the rest of them.  
But whatever he was doing, it wasn’t working out too well. Another voice rose over them:  “But you’ve forgot something!” The voice was strange but only because it was new; otherwise it didn’t really sound at all like it belonged to someone who lived in a stinking heap that appeared to be the size of like, a piece of Battery City itself, and who covered their face with X’d-out eyes of a wolf which could tear out people’s throats. The voice was even-toned, a little deeper than Jet Star’s but not as deep as the Doctor Death-Defying’s had been on a radio, and Grace had about ten seconds to mentally rehearse all the swears she knew in her head before the voice started repeating again, coming closer. “Don’t you fabulousities know anything about road safety, I mean really, some grimy-ass runner with a hardon for chrome could just walk on up and--”  
The voice was right outside the Am now, and Grace could hear the runner’s boots (probably boots) crunching on the thin layer of sand and scrub.

  
_Fuck,_ she thought to herself fiercely, in Violet’s voice, and then she stood up all at once. She had to duck a little to not hit her head on the low roof of the car, but she wasn’t going to let some snake-talkng weirdo with blood on their breath (she had a bad feeling; and also the red on their jacket) find her crouching in a shadow that didn’t even cover her that well. She stuck out her chin as best as she could, clenching her fists and counterbalancing her weight with the messenger bag hanging off of her shoulder to her left hip.  
“—steal--oh.” The runner had stopped right in front of the lefthanded back door, which was open and Grace noticed for the first time had even been painted on the inside. The runner had taken their mask off. They had short hair; that was a little surprising, to Grace. Not incredibly short, but enough that it didn’t do any of the swoop that Kobra coiled his artfully into every morning. The runner’s skin was pale, and their eyes were pale, too. They smiled without showing teeth. “And you forgot some _one,_ killjoys! What kind of hospitality is that, huh? Leaving a youngling in the backseat all lonesome.”

They stepped back, holding the door even more open for her. The way they moved and acted was like everything was for show, too big and dramatic to be anything else. Their mask they held in the opposite hand, and they had three different knives and a blaster holstered from their hip all the way down to their boot. “Come on out, starshine,” they said to Grace.  
  
Taking a deep breath, Grace did.

She was surprised to find out the smell of the whatever-the-heaps-were didn’t even bother her that much anymore. Her knees popped after being crouched and sitting in the van so long, and she winced a little, then noticed the Possum looking at her and smoothed out her face careful as she could. Violet and Petra and the others had been good at that; for that matter, her mama had too. Grace had learned pretty well. She thought. She stared back at the Possum as they searched her face, making sure to stand as tall as she could be.  
The Possum laughed, then. “It really is you, Girl, isn’t it,” they said. “Well, fuck me. I thought the murder crew had gone and left you in the dust.”  
Grace froze up from her arms down;  she felt like her foot had gotten caught in a hole in the ground she hadn’t seen until it was too late. “What’d you say?” She managed, a little too thinly. She tried again: “Don’t _call_ me that, you don’t know me. And even if you did that’s the wrong one.”  
The Possum paused, and then laughed, whoever they was. They leaned their hands on their knees and ducked their head so Grace and them were on the same eye-level. “What’s your name then, sugarling?” They asked.  
“Cat,” she said, the first noun that popped into her head. _Yeah._ It made sense. She drew herself up again from where she’d instinctively shrunk down. “I bite off rodents who bother me,” she snapped.  
The Possum laughed again, dropping their hands from their knees and standing up fully. Shit, but they were tall. “Cat! That’s milkshake. I guess Petra Pitface was wrong about you, then, huh? You’re not nobodyheaded at all.”  
“Don’t call her that!” Grace shouted without meaning too. “And don’t call _me_ that, either. I don’t even know you.”  
“Hey, hey, there’s no need for volume.” The Possum straightened up again. “That’s so, though? My name’s Sid Skid Mark, resident sunshine.” the Possum said, easy as you please. “You should know me.”  
“I don’t.”  
The Possum waved his hand around in the air vaguely. “Well you don’t know _me_ me. I know you from Ronny, who knows you from the girls in your gang. Or your _old_ gang, I guess.” He cut his eyes towards the Fabulous Killjoys, who were looking at them and somehow hadn’t said anything. “You’ve traded up.”  
“Shut the _fuck_ up,” Grace said, as fierce as  she could. “Just-- shut up! I haven’t traded anything.”  
“Nah, no. Course not. You and the littlest just got given a bunch of sacrificive gifts,” he said. When Grace startled again despite her efforts not too, Sid shrugged. “Did you not think word got around? Or you know, no, don’t answer that, surgarling. Come over here.” He reached out towards her as casually as he had the car.  
  
Grace stepped backwards and then ducked under even the overreached part of his hand. She didn’t want to go anywhere he was near, but then, she couldn’t go back in the car. So she went the only way there was to go: left, to where the others were standing.

She picked an open space in front of Kobra and Jet Star, just slightly out of arm reach, and then spun around.  
Sid Skid Mark was way closer behind her than she’d thought he’d be, but he wasn’t focused on her anymore. In fact he was barely focused on the Fabulous killjoys in front of him at all; he'd taken to staring at the top of a nearby stack full of what looked like… old couches or beds? Maybe. Mouldery fabric, plastic and wood.  
Grace tried to follow his eyesight, wondering briefly what a Possum’s eyesight was like, but then she felt someone tap on her shoulder. She flinched a little and then turned to find that Jet Star was shaking his head a little at her, a minute ‘no’. Annoyance flared in Grace’s stomach and she stepped slightly farther away, shaking off a shoulder that didn’t even have anyone touching it anymore, but she didn’t try and follow what the Possum was looking at anymore either. She remembered the leg full of knives.  
“Alright. Look here sunshines, and youngblood,” Skid said suddenly. He tapped his wolf mask twice on his other hand, and then stuck it over his head again. It was a little bizarre seeing the molten-seeming plastic mold to and then inflate to cover his head. (When he spoke he could still talk properly; there must be a speaker or something there.) “We’ve got what you’ve given us, so you’ve got two hours. And, ‘cause titchy here’s a friend of a friend, we’ll even give you a _one,_ ” he held his hands up with a single, non-middle finger in the air, _one,_ “-time discount over in the hat shack. Get the kid a breather ‘fore she gets the sun in her lungs. One time only, come again trying again and you’re flash-fried. Hear me?”  
“Crystal,” Kobra confirmed. He’d put a helmet on, it looked like Jet Star’s except painted over bright and rounder. The part that went over his eyes said ‘Good Luck’ in wide white letters. (The fabulous killjoys all carried so many _letters._ )

That was when Grace noticed for the first time that she was the only one who didn’t have something covering their face. Jet and Kobra Kid both had helmets. Fun Ghoul had a ghoul mask, soft-looking but also kind of gross. Even Party Poison, who was wearing a glower and a bright yellow eye-covers, had a huge MouseKat head resting on his hip with its attached valve for recycling oxygen. Whatever was burning out here must be but bad, for all of them to be cycled up like this. Grace felt herself start breathing more shallowly like that would help. She wished she’d thought to put on her scarf-mask before she’d gotten out of the car.  
“Time starts now,” Sid Skid Mark said, and he’d pushed past them and vanished into the stacks before Grace even properly noticed he was gone.  
  
“Well,” Ghoul said after a second. His voice by comparison sounded robotic and weird coming from under his green mask.  
Grace realized, very suddenly, that they all must have heard what Skid Mark had said, and they probably guessed some things about where she came from now. Grace had no idea how to deal with that, so she compromised by not doing anything.  
She stuck her hands inside her pockets like that would help. It was a little hard to make them fit.  
“Milkshake,” Poison said out to nothing in particular. He swiped his mouth-length red hair back from his face in a single dramatic sweep and then stepped so he was just slightly in front of the rest of them, apparently now all business. He swivelled on his foot to face them and then pointed to Kobra Kid. “You’re with me, Jet you’re on perishables, Ghoul get the kid a face-coverer and breather as soon as you can. And you--stay by Ghoul, honey. No running off nowhere at all. This place is full of traps. Everybody meet back by the Am in—no, look, we’ll radio you when it’s time. And don’t be fucking late.” And with that he put the MouseKat on his head, latched it onto the top of his jacket with the couple of belts and clips, and then turned and took off running, literally running. Grace wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Poison run before; it turned out he was _fast.  
_ Kobra took off after him, and Jet Star swivelled a different direction and started a sprint. Some of the dust on the ground kicked up in his wake. The ground was kind of greasy at some points, and normal in others. The greasy dust stayed down.  
“Gone with a capital ‘G’,” Ghoul said, looking at all of them with (probably) a lot less of a dropped jaw than Grace had. He made to lift his hand but then dropped it again; which was good, because Grace was ready to flinch away from him, but she didn’t have to. “Let’s get going, chickpea,” he said instead. “You don’t want to breathe this longer than you gotta, ‘snot good for your insides or outsides. And move _fast,_ two hours ain’t a lot to find things. Hat shack’s that way.”  
He pointed her a direction, and then waited until she’d got the hint and started sprinting, too.

The hat shack’s actually just a pile of stuff. Grace was expecting a gas-station kind of set up, at least—concrete poles with a roof attached— with maybe some tables or benches or something, but most of it was just laying on the ground, and the stuff that wasn’t on the ground was laying on top of other stuff. Grace wasn’t sure if she wanted to touch anything that might have been on the ground for like, _years._ But on the other hand she’d been breathing the weird smokey air for almost a while now, pulling more of it into her lungs when she’d sprinted the way that Ghoul had pointed her and then even when she was slowing down as he ran past her to show her the way through all of the piles and piles and _piles_ of dump matter, and she was starting to feel a little dizzy. Her lungs hurt. When they actually got to the “hat shack” and Grace saw it was just another bunch of stuff reaching up from the dirt, she thought all of this, and then thought that she wasn’t really surprised, and then she made to sit down because with her head all spinny she couldn’t really see straight.  
Ghoul caught her arm with an alarmed sound. “You don’t wanna do that, chickpea, all the Possums wear boots for a reason. There’s layers of glass and shit all over this place.”  
Grace sighed without meaning too, but instead of leaning back to sit down she leaned forward so she could grab onto her knees and steady herself a little that way. She knew she shouldn’t take deep breaths but it was hard for her to breathe anyway, and she couldn’t _stop_ breathing. Wouldn’t it be better to take deep breaths so you don’t pass out if you were still breathing whatever it was in anyway?  
“Shit,” Ghoul said in alarm. His hand was still on her arm, but Grace found she didn’t care so much about that; he was just trying to make sure she didn’t fall over and get stuck on the glass. “Alright. Come on, we need to see if we can spy anything for you to put your breathing through. Stand up, okay?”  
Grace responded to the tug to pull her upright and then, with a little bit of concentration, pulled away from him. “I can stand on my own,” she said, but her voice came out a little messed up so it probably sounded more like “Icanstan on mown”. It didn’t matter; what mattered was that she could. She stood up straight, keeping her hand on her hip and her other hand anchored in her bag’s strap so she could stabilize herself a little.  
Then she walked over to a side of the wide pile; it was about as tall as her in the middle and gradually slanted up. Sid Skid Mark had been as wrong about the ‘hat’ part of it as he’d been about the ‘shack’ part, unless the Dumpster Possum crew generally called anything that could conceivably go on someone’s head a ‘hat’. There were a couple of actual head-coverers there, some of them even the wide-ended kind that she’d seen in fairs that could keep the sun off a body’s face or keep ears warm during a stomach-dropping Zone Three cold night. There were also just face-covers though, the kind that… Grace had no idea. The kind that looked like they might have been in a war. Her teachers in Primary Ed had told them sometimes about the Wars, the Helium Wars and the old, old ones before it that had happened on the planet before the Fires. They didn’t mention how or why or who anyone was fighting for what reason, they just mentioned how horrible it was, and why they (the students) were so lucky to have been born into a Better Living life.       One of the things they talked about was gas no one could breathe through, and they had to wear special coverings on their faces so they wouldn’t _die._ Grace had, at the time, thought that the wars her teachers had talked about had been a really long time ago, but if there were things that looked like they were in wars just sitting in this pile of old, pre-Fires city stuff (she guessed; she couldn’t imagine the Possums getting this anywhere else, there was just so _much_ ) than the wars must have been sooner than she thought they’d been. It wasn’t surprising. Her teachers had lied or been wrong about all kinds of things about the Zones, and the people who lived out here. But it was still a little off-putting for Grace to think about.  
She wrapped her hands more thoroughly into the ends of her jacket’s sleeves and then scrambled up the slanted side of the pile, her shoes landing unevenly and sometimes squishing, sometimes sliding off the various shapes and materials underneath them. Once she was about halfway up, she selected one of the possible-war things she’d seen from the side of the whole pile, and leaned down to get it. It was a little hard to balance and pull at the same time, especially with the light beat her head had started drumming out, but with some maneouvering she managed to get it free. She stood up with it in her hands. It was white and beige in equal parts, square in shape with a circle part on where she guessed someone’s mouth would go. Two white straps hung off the sides, she guessed to hang on someone’s ears. From the front, looking straight on it, it looked almost like a point and shoot camera from the City except for the parts that were molded to go over a person’s nose, and the two curves of tubing that made upside-down U’s out of and back into the little pockets that she guessed were the filtering bits. It all fit together solidly without any loose parts. She felt a little triumphant and a lot dizzy; mostly happy just to look at it.  
“What’ve you got, roadgoblin?” Ghoul’s slightly garbled voice floated to her over from her left.  
She looked up to see him scrambling over the piles of stuff.

She couldn’t see his expression through the monster plastic—obviously—but it seemed like he was looking approving when he finally got to her and moved his head to look at first the face war-thing and then at Grace’s face herself. “That’s pretty good,” he said, and yeah that definitely sounded approving. “See it?” He opened his hand towards her, making a ‘gimme’ kind of gesture.  
Grace didn’t really want to hand it over, but it wasn’t like it was hers alone or anything. It was just weird trash, like the rest of this place. She passed it to the Ghoul with the little circle mouth-cover parts facing up.  
Ghoul nodded several times after taking what Grace passed him. He turned it over and over in his hands, taking one end and shaking it like it was a boot. He peered into the part that would go over someone’s face and then nodded even. “Not broken at soles, looks like charc… This might actually _work,_ motorbaby,” he said. “Where’d you find this?”  
Grace gestured over to the piles that made up the main pile at her feet.  
Fun Ghoul nodded. “Shiny,” he said. “The newer stuff is most near the top, most days, so it’s a good score. Hey—this the first time you’ve been here?”  
Grace nodded. She didn’t know why he was asking but she could guess; he was trying to gauge how much of what Skid had spit was true. But she really hadn’t ever been here before, she didn’t even think the punks had mentioned it.  
“Huh. New one’s luck, I guess.” Ghoul tossed the mask in the air and then caught it, seemingly satisfied. He held it back out towards her. “You want I should help you fasten it? Those straps can be annoying the first time.”   
Grace shook her head almost before he was done finishing the sentence. “I can do it,” she said. And she didn’t really want anybody near her hair or her face or anything.  
“Suit yourself, small one,” Ghoul said. “Just get it over your mouth and your nose, alright? Otherwise it won’t do but shit.”  
Grace nodded. She held the straps in her hands and tested their give; it turned out they were elastic, and they had little hooks at the end of either strap that attached to each other. _Well that makes it a lot easier,_ she thought to herself, and then pulled the whole thing over her face. It felt heavy on the front of her face, and the part of her nose that got covered made her feel a little panicky. Her heartbeat started to kickdrum in her head again, even though she felt like it should be in her chest. But she breathed regularly, like she figured she should, and then she started to feel a little better. The fuzz and static in her head started to clear.  
In front of her, Ghoul had pushed his own mask up over his face and was squinting at her in the sunshine. “You feel better?”  
Grace just breathed for a couple more seconds. Then she nodded.  
“Good.” Ghoul pulled his own mask back over his face then, and adjusted it a little so it fit securely over his chin. “Let’s go get you some more face-covers then, huh?”  
“I have one,” she said, but it came out muffled and weird from the gas mask—the rebreather. Instead she shook her head side to side and then dug through her bag for a second, finally pulling out the slippery purple scarf that had been hers for months now. A pang went right through her chest to look at it—if she lost it or tore it or anything, Burn wouldn’t be able to give her another one, not ever. She pretended her shaking was just a cough, though, and then she halfed it into a triangle and tied the two ends around her face. It fit a little awkwardly over the rebreather, but the straps didn’t tangle or anything and it was still plenty large enough to make her unrecognizable under it. (As much as a single scarf could, anyway.)  
Ghoul looked at her. She wished he’d take his rebreather off, it was seriously creepy. But that was probably the point—killjoys and all kinds of Runners put on things that were sharper and grosser than them all the time. “Alright,” he said. “Do you have a mask for your eyeholes there too?”  
Grace hadn’t even thought of that. She could cut some sight-viewers in the scarf— _no way._ She shook her head no.  
“Negatory. Alright, well, we can just scratch something up for you back on base—let’s get off this trash heap and go find you a helmet, goblin.”  
  
“Why?” Grace asked, as pointed as she could. She still slid off the heap when Ghoul did, a little vindicated when Ghoul stumbled more than she did.  
He didn’t seem put off at all, though. “’Cause you can’t ride a bike without a helmet, your brain’d look like red slush all over the parkside,” he said, weird cheerfulness coming through even the mask. “Now, come on—after this we still need to keep an eyes out for other stuff you might need. We don’t come out here too often, so stock up. I’ll help. There’s some head-savers your size over by that old motorbike there, let’s start looking for something there. What else d’you want?”

 

*  
  
She and Ghoul ended up spending the rest of the two hours hopping over various obstacles in what he called “the people’s stuff” section of the Dumps. (As he explained it, Jet Star was hunting around in the “factories stuff” part of the place, while Kobra and Poison were mucking around in the “wires and workshops stuff” area. There were more areas, too, ‘cause the place was huge.) Grace found a helmet, a simple black thing made out of what felt like tire rubber but with some kind of foam underneath that and the inside, but Ghoul advised she not wear it until they got back to the diner and boiled some sloughwater to clean it out with. Grace couldn’t really argue that.  
She could, though, apparently skitter up the slopes and weird irregular valleys of the dump (“Stink Heap”, as Ghoul called it and warned her to never, ever call it within even possible earshot of the Possums), with astonishing fastness and accuracy. She hadn’t fallen once in the whole time since Skid had disappeared into thin air; Ghoul had actually laughed at how fast she’d managed to climb one particularly unsturdy piled, which teetered backwards and forwards as though it was unsure of itself even as she’d landed on her feet in the dust and scuttled away. Grace was a little more used to Ghoul’s laugh, by now, than she’d been to Kobra’s laugh only a day or so ago, and it was weird, but it was still nice. Not to be laughed at; but to make someone be, like. Amazed. It was an amazed-laugh that Ghoul had, not a mocking one, and the difference between them was very important. Obviously. Grace felt nice when Ghoul laughed at her ‘cause she was doing something amazing, not that she was going to tell him that—or anybody anything. _Impressed._ Ghoul was impressed by her, that was the word. She smiled a little, just for a second when he was facing away. And she had her rebreather on, anyway.  
  
They did eventually find other things in the Peoples’ Stuff section that she was glad to have found, even though she wouldn’t admit it out loud. Jeans that fit so she won’t have a solid stripe of sunburn around her ankle and shin, for one thing. Maybe “fit” was the wrong word; their hems had went to the tops of her shoes when she’d held the waist up to her own waist and let the legs fall free. And technically they went past the tops of her feet; even she had to roll them up a couple times. She knew the clothes had probably belonged to another starshine once. She hoped that, wherever they were, they were okay, but she also knew that that was a bit of a stupid thing to hope. They were dark grey, almost City grey, except for the parts on the inside of the pants’ pockets that were almost glittery from something she had no idea about. She liked them, though. She also found some leggings, like what Burn had worn sometimes, and some grey shorts that went about to her knees and were barely even torn. Those would be good to wear when it got so hot out that the backs of her legs were sweating.  
She also found some _boots_ again _:_ flashier than her last ones, they were metal-looking and the colour of doorknobs, with three buckles up the sides to make sure they didn’t fall off your legs when running. Grace still wanted to keep her sneakers, but the boots looked, well. _Cool._ She had missed her old junk-punks ones while she had been staying in the diner. She wished that she could have remembered where she dropped them. Her sneakers were near worn-through, anyway. And—though she didn’t say this part to Ghoul, who followed close behind her no matter which pile she darted too—and they made her think of what Hope would’ve liked, if she’d been picking out her own boots here. The little six-year-old would’ve definitely told her to take the boots. They were shiny. In at least two meanings of the word. Grace put them on, keeping her worn out sneakers safely at the bottom of her bag.  
There were also some longer-sleeved shirts that she just grabbed because they looked like they would fit her—and because they were bright, she liked bright things. One of them wasn’t particularly bright, just sturdy, but that would be good too and she could put it over the other one(s, if she got really cold). She’d told Ghoul this and he’d nodded, saying, “Good guess, goblinling.” She’d thought that wearing layers in case it got cold was just really basic, but maybe not.  
Ghoul kept insisting that she get some kind of jacket to go with it, even though she already _had one and wasn’t giving it up._ It, listening to him bug her about it, was sort of like when her and Hope would used to get annoyed with each other and one of them would do the “I’m not poking you” trick without actually like, poking, even though it seemed like you were and it always ended in one of them getting shoved in the ribs. Grace was not about to shove Ghoul, though. She ended up just grabbing a puffy vest to shut him up. It had a zipper up the front no sleeves, but it was blue _and_ yellow _and_ red, so she liked it. It even had actual pockets sewn into the sides, with their own tiny side-zippers. She liked the sound that zippers made when you pulled them up or down, and how float the puffiness of the vest felt when she put it on was cool, too.  
She stuck the vest and the long-sleeved shirt and the coarser button-up shirt all into her messenger bag, too, stubbornly keeping her City whites on her jacket, even with all the new things around. She wasn’t going to give it up.  
  
Ghoul got some things too, while the both of them scrambled over the piles like a couple of trained squirrels that Grace had used to see in her Propaganda Presentations in school (during which BLI’s mouse mascot opened a circus and everyone who came inside had fixed anything that was wrong with them even if there wasn’t really anything wrong). Grace was pretty sure the trained squirrels didn’t have this much weird _stuff_ under their little pawed feet, though, and also whatever dirt and slightly smearing grease that was getting all over her hands. Ghoul was even worse off; he grabbed everything with his bare hands, and was looking for more “mating plumage”, as he told Grace, because there was a certain sugarspice who’d caught his eye and he wanted to catch hers as much as he could. All of the stuff Ghoul thought was flashy was inevitably caught under old boots or sneakers or, once, a misplaced shovel that looked like it had crusted blood on one end.  
Grace literally backed away when she saw that one, but Ghoul just grinned and shrugged. He’d used his foot to knock the shovel over—sending a small cascade of _stuff_ down the side of the pile like gravel scree until it settled on top of all the other things people used to have worn; the bloody death shovel travelled down it before coming to a rest amid some old socks with an unsettlingly loud _clunk._  When he was done watching the action, Ghoul nodded, then he’d grabbed the thing he’d wanted. It was a shirt, just a plain white shirt.  
Grace looked at him sideways.  
He shrugged, waving the t-shirt like a flag. “Easy to scribble stuff on,” he said. “Do you know how much shirts in the desert have nothing on their fronts?”  
“It’s got some stuff on it,” Grace said, pointing. (She’d found some leathery-plastic half-gloves that had the fingers cut off, dark blue like one of the pairs of her jeans and the blue part of the puffy vest that was, apparently, hers now. They were pretty sweet. Ghoul said they were for motorcycles, but Grace liked them without.) She was pointing at the reddish, part dirt-part blood stain that had smeared all around the hem.  
Ghoul turned the shirt towards him and then shrugged again. “Can rip that part off,” he said.    
Grace could concede that point. She didn’t say anything, though; just shrugged right back.

  
The talkie attached to Ghoul’s hip started buzzing its little metal brains out when Ghoul and Grace had started in on what seemed like two edges of territories seeping together, as far as the contents of the piles were the concerned, the shirts and pants and shoes and occasional   
blood shovel mixing in the valleys between piles with bits of old car leather and some old seatbelts and other soft but still machine-used junk. Ghoul grabbed the two-way radio off his belt to silence it, looking over to where Grace was perched slightly above him (seeing if she could balance on an old silver car’s door that was unattached to any other part of the old car). “It’s time to scramble I guess,” he called up.  
Grace was looking over her shoulder at the time. She’d felt her neck prickle with someone else’s eyes a second before. _Someone else guesses that too,_ she thought. Off in the distance, under a vertical pile of old chords to one thing or another and huge metal boxes that Grace couldn’t guess the use for, a Possum-shaped shadow with an exaggerated mask head stepped back into the maze. Grace turned back to Ghoul and nodded, stepping sideways off the slippery car lid and hop-skipping down the side.  
Ghoul talked the whole way back, pretty much, just remarking on various things that they passed on the way.  
Grace wondered if he thought she didn’t notice how he was holding his blaster off from his holster and keeping it tight in his hands. She knew that that was more a safety-catch than anything; you don’t fire on someone else’s turf, not unless you’re looking for a war. The Fabulous killjoys had traded for their time here, they wouldn’t want to stir up anything. And the Possums had traded with _them,_ so they probably didn’t want to actually blast anyone to pieces if they weren’t being threatening. Still, the vague pride and laughing feelings that she’d felt since Skid Mark had disappeared into the ether slid backwards in her head until they were covered over by worry and prickly neck and skittishness and vague, heavy sadness again. She hurried to keep up with Ghoul, and then stayed a couple steps in front of (and to the side of) him when she got caught up, looking to the side to see where and when he was looking around. She didn’t want to get left behind. 

By the time the two of them get to the place that Poison had parked the Trans Am Grace doesn't feel very good at all.

She still looked around quickly to make sure that all the Fabulous Killjoys were accounted for when they got to the car itself. Jet Star must have still been  out in the dump. Party Poison and Kora Kid were standing at their respective doors, rebreathers still on, the lines  of their arms and legs all sharp and antsy.

When they saw Fun Ghoul and Grace speeding their way out of the masses, Kobra nodded curtly while Poison opened his arms to hurry them faster into the car.

  
Ghoul let Grace go first which was just as well.

Grace climbed into the car, a little off balance with her bag hanging off her shoulder so heavily. She was shaky and _tired_ , too. It'd been a long time since she'd walked so much, not even thinking about running and climbing and hopping and hopping and jumping off of things. The last time she had done any of that was-- well, when she and Hope had been climbing on the Joshua tree outside of Murder City, some time during the rains. Grace's chest felt sore from the inside out; both because she missed her sweet, scabby-elbowed little sister and because she had suddenly realized she didn't remember the tree’s name.

It was suddenly a lot harder to breathe inside the cramped square rebreather mask. Grace scrabbled at the straps holding it onto her head until they came apart and the whole rebreather fell into her lap. Her first involuntary breath hurt her lungs again, which hurt her eyes, and if anyone asked she was going to tell them that that was why her eyes were full of tears she was not crying at all.

Scratch that; she wouldn't actually tell them anything. Ghoul looked up from inspecting his own haul and paused.  "You should really keep that o until we're out of this popsicle stand, motorbaby," he said, then looked up more and (hypocrite) pulled off his own mask for a minute  "You upset? What's wrong?"

Grace shrugged one shoulder, definitely not wiping her eyes.  She pulled her-- Burn's and then hers-- scarf up over her mouth and then her nose and then her eyes, too, just resting her entire face in the soft purple for a little while.

Ghoul didn't seem the type of 'joy to just leave something as easy as being ignored once, but he was a little distracted just then by the other three doors to the car slamming shut. Grace heard the doors slam  and then felt who must have been Jet Star drop into the seat beside her and buckle his seatbelt incredibly fast. In the seats in front of he she heard the huffs and clicks of Poison and Kobra doing theirs up too.

"Three minutes," Kobra said. There was a weird beep that followed his words, followed by a couple taps like a bird that was tapping on a concrete wall it thought was a tree. "If they kept their count up."

"Kept their count down is more fucking like it," Poison said, his  voice coming out muffled through the Mouse Kat face. Grace almost wanted to peek out from her scarf to see how he'd made it into the car with the huge shaped  helmet on, but then a loud hollow _thunk_ resonated through the Am and he spoke again, clearly. "Got what all we needed? Everybody got what we came in with still?"

"Got a whole thing, man," Jet Star said.

Poison's seat squeaked as he leaned it backed; Grace felt it move backwards near her left knee. "You milkshake, honey?"  
"Poison," Kobra said, a second of warning on the outside of his word.

"Alright," Poison announced, like he was an seeing response - questions to what he'd said to all of them. Then, with a dull thunder and a lurch, he was backing the car up and swinging it around.  
  
Grace felt the car's movement in her back and core as she swing around with it, pressing her back against the off-road fabric seat cover so she wouldn't topple into the sunshine on either side if her.

If she was with the junk punks no one would have cared. The thought only makes her sadder. She adjusts the scarf so it covers her face from her hairline right down.  
Her mask stayed like that, stuck in her hair like one of Violet’s old bandanas but falling easily down the rest of her face. 

“You okay there, starshine?” Ghoul asked, what seemed like legitimate worry tinging his voice. “Got something in your eyes? We can wash ‘em out. Give you some drink.”  
_Not the way you mean,_ Grace though a little harshly. But that wasn’t any kind of fair. She just shook her head, keeping the tops of her fingernails pressed to the top of the scarf, by where her hair started to grow in all its springs and coils. “Leave me alone,” she mumbled.  
  
There was relative quiet in the car for about five minutes; give or take. If any songs had been winding through it felt, to Grace, like there would’ve been room for one and a half of them to travel unopposed by any Runner’s voices.Grace thought she might actually get some peace; but that made her annoyed, too. She didn’t want people to _actually_ leave her alone, she just didn’t want them asking her questions for a while. Why didn’t anyone get that?  
She lifted the scarf away from her eyes, just to see. First and most importantly it didn’t sting her throat and eyes to breathe anymore. Secondly, Poison was still driving, hands holding the steering wheel and regular wheels pretty steady on the unsteady terrain underneath the car. Kobra was out of her line of sight. She looked to her right; Jet Star had taken off his helmet and zoned out, it looked like, his eyes closed and easy and one of his hands up by his face to cushion the vibes humming out from the side window. Even Ghoul (also unmasked) was quiet when she looked over at him, though his eyes were open and gazing without actual focussed sight into space. letting her hands down more so she was kind of holding her scarf in front of her like a kid held their blankets when they woke up and it was too cold. After another second, she just put it down completely back into her lap, reconsidered, and then tied it onto her arm like Poison had his kerchief tied to his leg. Hers was easier to reach, in case a storm blew up. She couldn’t quite get it to stay on, which she frowned at.  
Something tapped on the window. Grace looked to her left instinctively and to see it was Ghoul, tapping on the window with his knuckle. He nodded at her, then gestured with his fingers to her scarf. “Want help?”  
_No,_ Grace wanted to say, but she also didn’t really want to say that; she wasn’t that annoyed or scratch-filled anymore. She held her arm out.  
Ghoul fixed the scarf to her arm efficiently and fast. “It’ll be good you need to flag someone down,” he said. “If, I mean.”  
“And not to breathe dust,” Grace said back, taking her arm back. She rested both of her arms on top of her bag, then took a second to put her new-old rebreather into the bag too.  Both of the two of them were talking quieter than they would’ve otherwise, to not wake Jet and possibly Kobra Kid.  
Ghoul nodded at her again, a side of his mouth quirking up. “You know, I don’t think we’ve ever introduced,” he said. “I’m--”  
“I know all your names,” Grace confessed.  
Ghoul blinked. “Huh.”  
“I saw all your posters,” she explained. She shifted in the seat so she could talk and still look at him. “A long while ago.” Grace pointed to the front seat and then the other two seats around them in turn. “Party Poison, Kobra Kid, Jet Star.” She pointed at him. “And you’re Fun Ghoul.”  
He looked impressed. Then he pointed at her and raised his eyebrows. “And you’re?”  
Grace pressed her back teeth together, carefully, like that would make a difference. There wasn’t any danger signal: the only hum radiating through her was from the car. “I don’t know yet,” she said, and she was even telling the truth this time. It was weird; Kobra and Poison had both asked her what her name was, and she hadn’t given any kind of answer to them at all. She liked Ghoul better, she decided. Right then anyway. He didn’t seem… whatever the other two had seemed. Less weird and unknown. More like the teenagers she’d known, maybe.  
Ghoul’s eyebrows went up to the fringe of his shaggy hair again. “Huh.” He repeated himself.  
“What, you’ve never met someone without a name before,” Grace deadpanned.  
“Of course he has, motorgoblin,” Kobra said. Both Grace and Ghoul turned to look at him at the same time.  
Grace has to lean forward a little, otherwise she’d be leaning into Ghoul’s space. She’s still holdirng herself as still as she can in her little square of seat, her knees bracketing the messenger bag which her entire world in items is rattling around inside. Or not rattling so much anymore, except for the rebreather and—right—the pair of boots. It’s heavier and more angular and just generally fuller than Grace can remember it being for a long time. She looked up from it to see Kobra looking over his shoulder at the two of them. His eyeglasses are off, which is weird. But then it’s also a lot darker out than it had been earlier—when did that happen? She stared out the windshield for a second at the suddenly mostly-dark sky. They were going… west, maybe. She couldn’t see the sun anymore behind the hills, just a vague general idea of where it might have ended up after it’s wheel across the sky, and also the faint glow leftover from its rolling down. It’s not _too_ late yet, but they hadn’t left that late, either. Grace felt a little dizzy.  
“You were sleeping,” Kobra said. He’d been looking between her and the front window, his eyes flicking back and forwards until something must have clicked in his head. He cocked his head towards her, a little clearer in the ambient light. The thinnest part of his nose looks oddly fragile without his flyglasses covering it. He had a bunch of dirt smudged along the line of it, so much so it almost looked on purpose. “It’s nothing, roadgoblin--”  
“It’s fine, you were just out for a while,” Ghoul added. There was a rustle and a feeling of movement in the air behind her back. He’d probably done the lift – hand-but-don’t-actually go-near thing again.  
She’d just fallen asleep. Why was she freaking out so hard, it was just sleep. Just night. “I don’t like the dark,” she blurted, not very loud. It was still louder than a ten year old should have said, though. She squeezed her hands into fists and then sat back again. “It’s— it’s nothing,” she said, deciding to echo Kobra. “It’s just static, ‘m alright.”  
“You don’t have to lie, honey,” Kobra said.  
Grace looked up at him, surprisied even out of her mini-worrying fit. She narrowed her eyebrows a little. “That’s what Poison says, not you,” she said.  
Kobra shrugged. “What he says spreads,” he told her—and Ghoul, who straight-up giggled beside her. “Keep it clean, trashbrain,” Kobra added drily.  
“You’re the one who woke the fuck up with it on your brain, snakeface,” Ghoul snickered. "He means that what Poison says spreads if you spend a lot of time drinking it down," he added in Grace's direction.  
  
Grace didn't process that because she wasn't paying attention. “How far out _are_ we?” She asked out loud.  
While the Fabulous killjoys had been talking to each other she had zoned out (ha, ha, she thought to herself) a little, staring out the window on her left around Ghoul’s slowly hollowing out and duskifying shadowy outline. They’d been driving for long enough it had gotten dark, but they still weren’t anywhere she knew. The desert they were going through now looked different to the desert that was around the stretch of highway that she could see from when she had walked out to the front of the gas pumps by the diner; unpaved asphalt, outstretched like arms, going on and on into the light-line on the edge of the world in both directions. West and East, she guessed, because of the sun.

“Desert,” Kobra said unhelpfully; he’d turned back to face the blushing sky now but Grace could still see the side of him if she leaned forwards a little.

“Sixth zone,” Ghoul finished for him. “In the—foothills?” He squinted outside the windows, rubbing at it with his grimy hand like that would help anything. It actually made the windows look worse.  
Grace would have laughed at that except that her head was starting to do the swaying-spin thing again. “That’s way out,” she said. The junk punks had never, ever gone out near this far. She had thought the only things out here were Road rats.  
“Yeah,” Ghoul agreed. His voice sounded different, like he was thinking of something else, but it was a something else that made him happy. Or something close to happy. He was rubbing at his hand, at one of his interwinding tattoos. “Not much but road, rads, and Road Rats out here,” he said. “And us too.”  
_Nothing here but us chicks,_ Grace thought, and the only place she would’ve heard that was from her Primary Ed teacher, an android. She had laughed in her musically-based terabyte voice, whenever she’d walked into the classroom and pretended to count Grace and her classmates to make sure no one was extra or missing.  
If this place was Zone Six then it was the farthest Grace had ever, ever been from her home. Very abruptly she felt sick again. She closed her eyes to try and ward it off.

“Kid,” Ghoul said, sounding a bit alarmed. Grace cracked open her eyes again but he wasn’t talking to her; it looked like he was talking about her.  
Kobra was peering over his shoulder again.  
“Why doesn’t she look too good?” Ghoul demanded of him.  
“Road spins,” Kobra muttered. “We got any water?”  
“Don’t want any,” Grace said. It wasn’t even stubbornness, just the thought of water made her feel a kind of sick. “Just… tired,” she said. And it came out sounding like a suggestion to herself, but that was fine, because no one else was going to suggest anything else to make her feel better.  
“Alright,” Kobra said. “Nap, then.”

 

Well. Except for that.  
Grace didn’t want to sleep; sleeping had set off whatever was going on in her head in the first place. Still, she tried to comfortably lean her back against the backseat as much as she could. Leaning forward to be able to hear Kobra (and Poison, who'd been silent and driving, but obviously awake) had been digging the seatbelt into her belly. Grace pulled her shirt down over it self-consciously.  
“You know you can put your feet straight to the seat-connector there, roadgoblin,” Ghoul pointed out to her.  
Grace shrugged, hugging her messenger bag later closer to her chest. Her robot, Gear, pressed onto her shin comfortingly. Her legs were starting to get sore, but that was fine.  
There was a pause, and then Ghoul sighed out loud. Or maybe it was a huff; it wasn’t a laugh, for sure. It sounded a little annoyed.  
Whatever. So Grace was being annoying. She closed her eyes to the almost not-even-there-anymore light, and focused on not passing out again.

 

*

 

  
She didn’t actually sleep; she was pretty sure. She only mostly did.

But whether she was totally conked out or not, when she opened her eyes again the only light in front of her was the pale kind from the moon slanting in some gaps between slanted boards in the Diner’s ramshackle garage. Someone had cracked a sticklight, a pale yellow one that almost matched the moon, and left it on the center console where Ghoul had suggested she rest her feet. Her feet that had slid to the floor all on their own. 

She sat there for a second, tilting her head back to the fuzzy red fabric of the seat. Then, carefully, she opened her messenger bag and looked inside.  
She reached in and pressed on some of the new clothes she’d got, feeling the fabric on the ends of her fingers.  
  
They weren’t just clothes. She hadn’t been able to tell Hope what they had meant, exactly, back when they'd been together; and it was like her little sister didn’t even _care_ after a while. She hadn’t been able to tell the junk punks, either, not really. They wouldn’t have listened right.

It was kind of like the bad luck beads, she thought. Or—no, it was like when you kept something of someone’s close to you, to keep them safe, and you safe. Something like that; her mama had told and it had been important, but Grace couldn’t really remember it anymore. The point was, her feathering that she had wasn’t just boring white-beige. It was her home. Her sister. Her mother. It was even Skitter, who’d loved the Hectic Glow and had given Grace the t-shirt with their scripted curved words across its front.

Grace would never see any of them again— she couldn’t tell herself that she’d see them again. They were gone. Shapes in the dust.  
The people whose clothes she had plucked off the ground today were probably gone, too, one way or another. Grace wondered, with the weird little shakiness that happened in her head sometimes, if if she put the colourful new-old clothes on then she herself would just be a shape in the dust too.  
Grace didn’t want to forget anybody. She didn’t want to disappear.

She breathed out, told herself sternly to stop crying. “You’re not six,” she muttered. The drops dripped into her bag anyway, getting caught on the soft dark denim of the too-long pants she (and Ghoul) had found.

Grace shook her head, pulling her hand out of the bag. Then she changed her mind and took Gear out of the bag. Hugging the robot to her side in one hand, she managed her bag with the other as she slung it across her shoulder.  
The lightstick shouldn’t stay in the Am while it was still this bright, in case there were animals, or drifters, who might see it and want to get nearer to it. Grace grabbed it between the edges of her fingers and then made her way inside, trying her best not to trip or make much sound.  
  
  
-

 


	5. Fuel

 

After that, the sharp edges that had been there between her and the Fabulous crew had gone down a little; blurred and blunted. Grace let herself relax a microfraction and notice that things weren't _bad,_ here. They were just different.

 

Grace woke up in the morning to find everybody except Jet Star gone again. It was maybe not morning, closer to the afternoon if the sun was in the middle of the sky (she checked outside; it was). But still. Waking up mostly alone in an empty building was a little jarring. A lot jarring, actually, Grace kind of hated it. The air was too hot and too quiet.  
It occurred to Grace then that she had been living in the same space as the Fabulous killjoys for some kind of while now, and it bothered her a little that she still didn’t know what the four sunshines who shared a living space (for lack of a better word) with her, like, _did._ They had to get their carbons somehow, they didn’t just swap for everything. She didn’t even know where in particular they went during the day. She had thought that maybe after seeing what the other three (being Jet Star, Kobra Kid and Party Poison) had brought back from the dump the day before would give her some kind of clue. But, with her falling asleep (she guessed) in the Trans Am on the way back and the three of them leaving so early in the morning… or maybe just her falling asleep so late into the day, today, she hadn’t even gotten a chance to see what “perishables” meant, or what exactly Poison and Kobra had been getting by themselves together the day before.  
  
Granted, she could ask Jet Star what perishables meant. He was there, right then. When she’d rolled over from her bench-bed that morning and then reached out reflexively for the ground to let herself—and Gear, who stayed beside her while she was sleeping—down onto the peeling linoleum at least as gently as wouldn’t give her an actual headache, when she had done that, Jet Star had been sitting on the counter in the main room of the diner. He’d been cleaning his bright blue gun methodically and bouncing his head to music that she guessed was mainly in his memory.  
She had watched him from under the table for a second before her bladder (and or kidneys, she had always got those mixed up on anatomy tests) started protesting, and then she’d crawled out from under it, stood up and stretched. Grace had thought to make a clattering with Gear on the floor because it wasn’t like Gear would mind and also she would feel kind of bad if she made Jet Star flinch by accident. At least if she was noisy then she could be sure that he knew she was awake, and stuff. That bid was successful, as far as she could guess, or see. Jet Star didn’t flinch or anything. He looked up twice instead. Once to be like, _oh hey the girl’s up,_ and then one more time, she guessed by the way he stopped bopping his head all of a sudden, to be like, _oh crap the girl’s up._  
Grace didn’t know why Jet Star acted like he was scared of her, or that she’d be scared of him if he moved the wrong way or anything. She would of course. But none of the Fabulous killjoys had moved weirdly yet, and she was starting to slowly actually believe what Poison had told her that day when he gave her the blanket to keep warm with. That none of them would do that kind of thing; not to anybody. She thought of telling him that she wasn’t going to be afraid of him just for cleaning a blaster and having a song in his head. She didn’t really want to talk to Jet Star yet, though, and she really did have to pee, so instead of saying anything she nodded to say, “Hey, I saw you and see that you stopped bopping you head”, and then she’d went outside to go to the latrine.  
   
When she got back inside Jet had moved right out of the main room of the diner entirely. She checked in the backroom—where she’d only been a couple times before, because it was all concrete and heat and buildings were _scary_ with no lights or windows—without seeing him, then in the place that used to be the old bathroom that three of the Killjoys now slept in and always smelled kind of weird. But he wasn’t in there either. Or the garage, which was when she had noticed that the car was gone.  
Finally she thought to look out of the front windows. It was a little harder than it sounded, the sun was hitting them just right that they glowed almost gold-white from the inside. She winced and held up her hands in a circle to protect her eyes, then leaned into the window to see out to the gas pumps. She saw a dark pair of legs sticking out from one of them. “Gotcha,” she said, then realized that sounded weird. “Oh well,” she said out loud. “Why are you out there?”  
He didn’t answer her, of course. In a split-second pick Grace put her hand on the glass doors’ metally handle part and pushed it open, stepping out into the desert day itself.  
  
Her half-gloves from the dump caught most of the heat, thankfully, because it bloomed out from her palm the moment she touched the metal like glass cracked from one point and then all around it and out, like the spoke-designs on a wheel or a star. Grace shook out her hand like it had been bothering her, which it was a little, and then walked over to Jet. “Hi,” she said out loud.  
Jet Star’s legs flexed for a second, then withdrew a bit. Jet’s curly head popped around the side of the huge concrete square-sided pillar he had been leaning up against. He looked vaguely surprised to see her here; outside. “Hi,” he said. His voice always sounded a little higher and softer than Grace expected it to. That wasn’t a bad thing. Part of that might have been the way he talked to her like---  
Grace blinked for a second as the understanding clicked into place. When Jet was super, like, knowing she was there, he acted like she had acted towards the cat that she’d seen around the corner of the diner. Like she’d run away, maybe.  
__  
The cat, she thought directly after realizing that. She said, “I’ll be right back,” to Jet Star where he was sitting on the ground (with a guitar! and glasses that were sort of like Kobra’s. They might actually have been Kobra’s, or just look like them). He’d nodded at her, in a way that was maybe kind of confused, but she hadn’t stopped to ask him about it for very long because she was already turning around and booking it towards the corner of the diner again.  
She climbed up onto the tank, carefully and as quietly as she could, just peeking her eyes over the edge as her fingertips clung on.  
No cat. Grace huffed out loud, disappointed, and then jumped down as loudly as she could. A bunch of sand slid into one of her shoes, making it heavier and Grace abruptly aware of how much of a hole had developed in the left toes. She kicked the wall for good measure, dusted off her hands, and sulked to herself all the way back to where Jet Star was sitting under the gas pump roof.  
  
He’d stood up, in the time that she had run off and the time it had taken her to walk back. His guitar he was carrying over his shoulder like a bag. His gun looked level on his belt. He didn’t have a holster, she realized, not like Poison or Ghoul did; instead he just stuck his blaster into a loop in his jeans like a keychain. She did that too, she thought a little pleased that someone else thought it was a good plan—and then her brain caught up with itself, and she remembered that she didn’t actually have her own blaster anymore. It was still hidden, somewhere. She still needed to find it.  
She wasn’t going to ask Jet Star about that, though. She needed to find it _herself;_ she could totally do that.  
“… need something, roadgoblin?” Jet Star asked gently, tipping his head to the side with one of his shoulders like she was sleeping sideways or something.  
She’d been standing there without talking, though. Right. She opened her mouth and, “No,” flew out before she’d even thought about it.  
Jet Star had looked a little startled, but then he’d nodded. “Alright. Well, I’m just out here to watch the road--”  
“What were you getting yesterday?” Grace asked, again without thinking about it too much. She scratched her arm, like she was nervous even though she wasn’t super nervous. She could talk better than this, more normal, she’d just have to try. “Poison said that you were getting perishables, at the Possum’s place. What does perishables mean?”  
“… stuff that’ll keep us from perishing,” Jet Star said. “You, uh, you want to know?” He was still kind of talking like he was expecting her to scamper off.  
“Yeah. And I’m not a cat,” she said, and then because he looked confused she added, “I’m not going to run away if you walk too fast or anything. You’re kind of acting like I am, but I’m not. There’s a cat over there though, that’s why I ran. I’m trying to get it to like me but it hasn’t been back since I first saw it, when I checked.” Grace felt a little dizzy, so she stopped talking.  
Jet Star was smiling a little. “I wasn’t trying to talk to you like you were a cat,” he said. “And perishables is like. Grub. Foodstuffs.”  
“You found those in the _dump_?” Grace said incredulously. She might not have known what all was sitting in those piles, minus the stuff she could see on top of them, but she was pretty sure that if a place’s air hurt you to breathe it you shouldn’t eat anything you found in that place.  
“Yeah, easy,” Jet Star said. “It’s all in cans or dry-pockets.”  
“Oh.” Grace thought for a second, looking into the distance. The outstretched arms of the highway beside the pumps looked as open as ever, nothing coming up or down from either direction. She looked back at Jet, pulling some of her hair out of her eyes. “Where do you keep it?”   
“In the back,” Jet Star said. “Uh, you want I should show you? I don’t have to sit out here all day,” he said, gesturing to the pump station. “No one much is going to roll up until about sundown, anyhow.”  
“Who’s coming at sundown?”  
“Just the crew. Coming _back,_ I guess. You don’t miss a word, huh,” he said, and it was kind of a half-question.  
Grace didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing or not. “Ghoul tell you that?” She hedged. She didn’t know how she felt about Ghoul talking to the guys in the crew about her knowing all their names. It wasn’t like it was a _secret_ or anything.  
Jet Star nodded. He was watching her kinda like Kobra did all the time, sort of careful but without looking at her face.  
Grace decided to shrug on the inside. On the outside she stuck her hands in her jeans’ pockets. “You were gonna show me?” She said.   
  
After an affirmative, Jet started walking back to the diner again. Grace followed behind him a little, looking at the whispy patterns in the dust and up at the whispy patterns of clouds in the sky. She also looked at Jet from time to time, to make sure he wasn’t too far ahead of her or anything.  
  
They got into the diner. He held the door open for her so she could scamper in first, then closed the doors behind him and went over to the doorway behind the counter where Grace had peeked in that morning, to see if any killjoys had been in there. He walked right into it, even in the dark.  
She went to it too, only holding back a little bit. Jet Star was, she noticed, limping a little, heavier on his right side. “What happened to your leg?”  
Jet Star looked over and down his shoulder at her, surprised that she’d noticed. “I fell, that’s all. That’s why I stayed here today. Usually it’s Kobra, but,” he shrugged.  
Grace was just about to ask him what he was being left behind to heal up while the other killhoys went to _do_ , like what the other killjoys were leaving him behind _from,_ but then he cracked a lightstick and it lit up the backroom. More shapes than Grace had thought made sense shone or loomed back at them in the sudden light. Grace startled backwards for a second, her brain plugging together _dark_ and _loom_ into _danger._ But then she saw that they were just stacks of stuff, and she stepped forwards again, curious.  
The stacks of stuff weren’t very high, maybe up to her knees or at the very largest her hip, on the floor.  
  
Perishables turned out to be exactly what Jet Star had said they were. Which was to say, perishables were the things stacked in loose piles in the back room, and a quarter of them were cans. The other three quarters looked like a bunch of things, dried foodstuffs and Meal and the kernel kind of Power Pup;  way in the right hand side of the room there was a small pile of what liked like sweet rocks, still in their pretty bright wrappers,  piled on the top of a old stove thing that had a smooth enough surface to pile stuff on.  
Jet Star gestured to a messed bundle of loose... it looked like thread, just normal thread without being a a shirt or anything, that was hung on a old coat hook by the far wall. You had to squint to make it out from the gloom. "I got that yesterday,"   he said. "You know what it's for?"  
"Fixing stuff together again," Grace said. Obviously, she thought. She sidestepped Jet Star so she could see into the room better--even n with the light stick there wasn't very much light, and too much shadow to cover it up over. She didn't do it to be rude. She realized it might seem like it did a half second later, and glanced over her shoulder in case Jet was one of those people who got upset or angry quietly.  
He was just watching her, though, the way anybody watched anybody going into their supply room.  
She wavered for a moment, unsure, then decided to take it as an "all clear".  
  
Of course Grace didn't take anything, like, picking it up. Even in the Murder City skylight of a stash place, which she'd gotten so used to, she hadn't taken stuff unless offered it first. It was more like a sussing out mission. She realized as she went cautiously deeper into the room that there was also, like, stuff to _do_ there in the farther back. Like some rollerskates stacked on top of each other on the floor in the corner and what looked like a really old kickball that had a chunk out of its soft outside like it’d been bit by a animal, and some more paper and stuff, and some _cards._ Grace stepped over to those in particular, looking down; they were irregularly shaped and had drawings on them, in addition to the numbers; like the Killjoys had drawn them and made them by themselves. Grace had a funny but not laughing feeling in her chest, looking at them on the floor, but she couldn’t rmemeber why.  
“You know how to play cards?” Jet Star asked, sounding surprised. He’d walked around her in a half-circle to see what she was looking down at, holding up the light.  
“Yeah,” Grace said. She scratched her arm. “Some games.”  
“Oh. Huh.”  
“I don’t want to play any card games right now,” Grace blurted. Not that Jet Star had asked her, but she wasn’t very… she didn’t feel like doing or asking much of anything, suddenly, anymore. Her chest kind of actually hurt and she felt sadness dragging down her shoulders.  
“Alright,” Jet Star said, nodding. His hair bopped a little when he nodded, the ends of some of his curls loose. “Well, I need to grab some stuff from here anyway.”  
  
“What are you grabbing,” Grace less ‘asked’ and more ‘wondered out loud’. She sidestepped him again, making her way back to the doorway where some of the sunlight from outside the diner was pooling in. Thankfully she didn’t trip over everything.  
On an impulse, when she got to the doorway, she kept walking through it and used her palms to let herself hop up onto the counter. She swung her legs back and forth since she just could. “I can still here you,” she said into the supply room, just in case Jet Star thought she couldn’t.  
 “I know,” he said, sounding a little muffled because he was facing away from her.  
Grace swung her legs and thought about how Jet Star was really tall, a lot taller than her, and really solid, and he had a voice that she thought would’ve been deeper than it was or at least harsher or something. Black Card, one of the Runners in Show Pony’s van who apparently everyone knew, had been only a little bit taller than her, she remembered suddenly, but he had had a voice that was a lot deeper than she’d been expecting. Kind of scratchier, too. They were opposites. She wondered if Black Card had been okay after the raid on the fair; she hoped so.  
Jet Star walked out of the room with two bottles full of clean, clear sweet stuff in his hands. They were BLI brand, the see-through plastic interrupted in the middle with a ring of white stamped by the Smile Face trademark, which had been printed in black. Jet Star held out one of the bottles to Grace, and she took it, nodding quickly at him. She hadn’t drank anything at all yet today.  
He took the bottle that was left and uncapped it, looking sideways at her to see if she was able to take the cap off by herself. (Of course she was.) He drank in one long uninterrupted drink, instead of a bunch of small zips like hiccups like Grace did.  
_Weird,_ Grace thought. But the water was good. It felt good on the dry insides of her mouth, even though the feel of it on her teeth had made her jump a little. She hadn’t used teeth scrubber chews in a while, she thought a little guiltily. She was sure if Mama was around--- _don’t,_ she reminded herself. _She isn’t._  
Jet had leaned against the doorway of the supply room, at first. Now he moved, walking over to near where she was and sitting on the counter himself. He was so tall he didn’t have to hop at all. He just kind of leaned sideways and lifted his feet. Jet angled how he sat so that they weren’t having a staring contest, or anything. He had taken off his guitar and laid it down somewhere—maybe inside the supply room. That made sense; it was a different kind of guitar than the junk punks had had, but it’d still probably need to stay out of the heat or the strings would stop playing the right songs.  
It seemed to Grace like that he had sat himself down a slightly bigger distance away from her than maybe someone else would have, like he was still nervous about being too close to her. Or that he was still nervous that she would get nervous, or something. She frowned a little down into her water bottle. The quiet in the diner wasn’t bothering her exactly but she still felt a little weird in it, like every noise her throat or her stomach made was followed by a ringing echo.  
“You eaten yet?” Jet Star asked after a minute. When Grace shook her head, he nodded, set down his water bottle by his hip, then reached under the counter they were sitting on—leaning forward to be able to grab whatever it was he was looking for—and rummaged for a second.  
Grace slid herself a little bit more farther away, just so they wouldn’t crack heads when he sat back up again.  
A moment later, he re-emerged with two cans of Power Pup Meat Solution in his hand. He dropped one onto the counter beside him, which thumped tinnily and made Grace blink a little at the noise. He offered the second one to her.  
It was just a pull tab, which was a lot easier to manage then a regular lid can. That was good: Jet didn’t seem to carry a knife, and of course, Grace’s was still gone. She peeled off the thin metallic lid, swept off the part of it that had food on it with her thumb, ate that, and then just dug into the rest of it with her fingers. If she hooked them and used them like scoops it worked pretty well. The Meat Solution was stored in a kind of jelly and looked like shredded bits of soft white stuff, which the jelly made a kind of brownish-grey.  She didn’t know what kind of meat it was; Avian Product or Herbiary Product like they’d learned in school, or something different. It didn’t taste good, exactly, the same way that Meal didn’t taste bad. It was good to eat something, though. She nodded a “thank you” over at Jet Star when she’d finished her first couple scoop-bites.  
Jet Star had shaken his can like it was a sweet drink he had wanted to make explode, then peeled off the lid and was tipping it up to his mouth like it was a kind of drink, too. He looked over at her when he’d lowered the dish to breathe for a second and nodded back, catching her eye for a brief second. “’s good,” he said, or maybe it was a, “’s good?”  
“Good,” Grace confirmed either way. She put her fingers in her mouth to clean the jelly off, because her jeans were starting to get kind of noticeably gross again.   
Just then, a small movement in the window behind Jet Star—far away behind, but still outlining him—caught Grace’s eye. She looked farther up, startled for a second. But there was nothing there.  
  
“What’s it?” Jet asked quickly, twisting around and putting his hand down for his gun which was resting in the edge of his boot.  
Grace had hopped off of the counter and gone over to the window before he’d even finished asking the question. She climbed onto the nearest booth in a crouch, only putting down her food on the bench’s table as an afterthought, and then crept as much as she could right up to the window until the end of her nose was almost touching it. (Thankfully the sun hadn’t quite hit the west side of the building yet, or she would’ve gotten burned from the heat from that close.) She held her breath as she looked out, both directions, ready to drop down if there was someone’s outline out there. But nobody was standing there. Except—  
“Hey!” She said, surprised, leaning back from the glass. Just on the corner edge of what she could see through the dust-stained glass, on the left beside the tall columns of the industrial-sized plastic barrels the Fabulous Killjoys used as rain-water tanks, she had seen a small flick of a black tail. She leaned forward again hurriedly, but it had already disappeared.  
“Motorbaby?”  
“The cat’s back,” she blurted out as she turned around as fast as she could. Her knee hit the side of the booth and she wheeled for a second, overbalancing, but then kept herself from faceplanting by grabbing on the edge of the table.  
The half-finished can of meat solution caught her eye; it was right in front of her. _That’ll work,_ Grace thought suddenly, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. She dropped from her knees onto her butt in the booth, scooted sideways until she was finally free of it and then stood up again. “Be right back,” she said to Jet Star, then grabbed the half-can of food and ran to the diner’s front door.  
  
Going outside in the desert could be like walking into a wall of dry fire or a wall of hot mud and especially in the afternoons, but maybe it was different up here in the sixth Zone because Grace only bad to blink for a couple seconds before she could see again in the sun. She hurried around the corner of the building. Right before turning it, she held her breath just for a second.  
There wasn’t any cat around the corner. Not one that she could see, anyway; she let her shoulders drop again, disappointed.   
Still, the cat had _been there,_ and that was good. At least it hadn’t turned into bleaching bones in the sun somewhere. She looked at the dish in her hand, which had gotten noticeably warmer since she’d stepped outside, and then squinted into the relative shadow by the building’s side again. Making up her mind, she scurried over to the huge gasoline tank and then, with some difficulty, climbed up the tinny ladder one-handed. As she pushed herself up from the last rung before she’d be able to see over the top of the canister, she paused.  
The cat was sitting at the far end of the sideways steel cylinder that was the old gas tank, flicking its black tail back and forth. Its white paws looked even more like boots than usual because they were dusted orange from its walking.  
“Hi,” Grace whispered to it. She was grateful when it didn’t run away at the sound of her voice; she smiled to herself. Then, carefully, she put down the can of meat in the middle of the little square of pipe where she had seen the cat sleeping, before.  
The cat moved, stretching its front paws and then staying there. Almost like it was laying down, but not.  
“Why are you doing that,” Grace wondered quietly. But maybe it wouldn’t eat unless she wasn’t there. She took her hand away from the can and then climbed down as fast as she could without hitting her feet on anything.  
As she guessed, the moment both of Grace’s feet were on the ground the cat stood up again. It kept stretching, holding out one of its skinny back legs at a time, and then hurried over to the can and did the sort of weird laying down pose again. It lowered its head and started eating, fast.  
Grace grinned up at it, even though the cat couldn’t see (obviously). “There you go,” she said out loud into the air. She wanted to climb back up and try and—she didn’t know, exactly, but she wanted to see how close she could get to that cat without it running away. But if she’d walked up to somebody while they were eating—or if somebody she hadn’t known had walked up to _her_ while she was eating—well, she would’ve bolted as soon as looked at them. Instead Grace took a seat on one of the mouldery broken tires that littered the side of the building, part of the flotsam and jetsam waste of the desert that had amazed her so much when she’d first gotten out of Battery but now didn’t seem like a big deal at all.  
She didn’t think that the cat would take very long to eat, and then it’d scamper off again. The cat stuck around though. It finished the can and then sniffed at it until it’d nudged the tin right off the edge of the gas tank with its tiny black nose. (Grace muffled her giggle behind her hand.) The cat peered over the edge of its perch, its small triangle ears pricking forward at the noise the can made as it tumbled over the sides and hiit the parked dirt with a tinny clang. After a second sniffing the air, the cat seemed to find the whole thing boring. It leaned back, away from the edge, and then curled up with its tail to its nose and its small feet tucked right up to itself. The cat looked exactly, more or less, like it had when Grace had first seen it. Its shallow sides rose and fell evenly.  
It was really weird, to Grace, that something alive could be so small. Obviously she knew that babies were even smaller than cats and that there were rats and mice and a bunch of other live-things that were _even_ smaller, but that was one of the things that never seemed very real to her unless she was sitting looking at a rat or mouse or grasshopper right then. As it was, she sat and watched the cat from on the ground, marvelling at the tiny-ness of its delicate-looking paws, and how its feet were dotted with three pads, like the palm of Grace’s hand, except a darker brown that was almost a kind of red. She wanted to poke them gently.  
  
A half-familiar shadow fell across the sand in front of her; Grace looked up instinctively, nodding at Jet Star where he was standing. “The cat stayed,” she said, still trying not to talk too loud in case that scared the aforementioned animal off.  
“Milkshake,” Jet Star said. He came over to where Grace was sitting and looked at the cat, too. It was a lot less of a way for him to look up, of course. The top of his eyes were almost at the top of the gasoline tank. He’d taken his guitar back from wherever he had dropped it, Grace noticed. It reflected the sun a little dully, like it would’ve shined in other circumstances but all it could manage then was a muted, but even, sheen where the sun lit up its yellow plastic basecoat. The strings shone more fiercely, being actual metal, and Grace looked away from it after a second because she was starting to see horizontal lines of green afterimage-light across her eyes where the guitar’s strings should have been. The lines stayed, even when the guitar was out of her sight.  
  
Jet Star sat down with a grunt, favouring the leg he’d been limping off of inside. Despite that, slinging the guitar off of his shoulder was done with an easy slide.  
What was more surprising to Grace was that he was sitting down at all. But she guessed it made sense. There were a bunch of miscellaneous-size concrete blocks beside the tire she was sitting on and the other flotsam in the almost-ditch beside the diner. It would’ve gotten tiring to be standing up until the cat went away. Grace hoped that the cat wouldn’t go away for a while; first of all, it was sleeping and she knew that cats needed a lot of sleep, and secondly if the cat left then Jet Star might leave, too. Grace dug in with one of her boots’ heels into the dirt, tracing a vague shape with a bunch of arches. It was kind of nice sitting beside someone; like it had been in the car. Grace wondered if she was going to think something like that every time she changed places. It seemed like the kind of thing she might; maybe it was just nice being in cars with people. And she’d have to leave here, eventually, for one reason or another. She looked up at Jet, squinting a little against the sun that almost backlit his hair. “Are you going to play music?” She asked.  
“Always,” Jet Star said. He smiled when Grace snickered. He fiddled with the tuning, turning the metal tabs fast so that he didn’t burn his hands and then testing the strings again. When he’d finally, apparently, figured out how he’d wanted it to sound, he started plucking out a tune that Grace couldn’t place or name.  
The sound was weird; definitely different than the other guitars that Grace had heard. Burn’s, specifically.  It sounded more like the songs that Grace heard on the transmissions or from up in the ceiling rafters in Glimmer; sort of twangy and, well, metallic. It sounded like the smell of your fingers after you got a new blaster all cold and fresh-made from a BLI overstock vending machine. Grace bopped her head to it a little, wishing she knew how to play any instrument herself. Burn had sang, she remembered.  The memory was little picks in her heart, just tiny darts. She closed her eyes and breathed for a while to wait for it to go away, but it didn’t. Burn had had such a heavy voice when she sang, but good, heavy like she could hold a tune down. To drown it out, Grace opened her eyes. “Are you gonna sing?” She asked Jet Star, looking over at his jeans and shoes from over the crook of her arm, like if he looked at her straight on he would know she was a smudge upset and get worried or whatever again and then leave.  
Surprisingly, to her at least given how carefully he’d treaded around her the entire rest of the day, Jet nodded. He was bobbing his head like her, not fully up-down thrashes like some of the dancing packs in Glimmer had done when a heavy song came on over the speakers and sent their long hair flying everywhere, but like he couldn’t stop himself from doing it otherwise. Still plucking out the song—that now  sounded like drops of rain on a deep puddle, making a wave—he cleared his throat once and then started to sing.  
Grace smiled despite herself. He was singing Green Day. That had been one of the junk punks’ favourites, too.  
  
When the song he was playing was over, Jet ended the notes with a little flourish, plucking the last note with extra care. “That would sound better, if it was plugged in,” he said.  
“Your hairs all over the place,” Grace pointed out, as well as actually pointing.  
Jet Star nodded again, maybe to prove the point. “It does that,” he said. Then, kind of like a little kid who was shy about stuff, he pointed at Grace’s hair. “You have pretty cool curls,” he said.  
Grace put her hand up to hold onto her head, feeling the way her hair bounced when she nodded her head. “I know,” she said. “They’re pretty great, huh.”  
“Very pretty great,” Jet Star replied. “Afro power.”   
“Huh?”  
“Fro power,” Jet Star repeated. He was smiling a little too, now. “It’s when your hair gets so powerful it goes all over the place without you even doing that much with nodding your head or anything.”  
Grace laughed, an actual out loud laugh. “I’ve never heard that before,” she said. “I like it.”  
“I do too,” Jet Star said. He looked at the guitar for a second, plucking out a few strings in a sound like an up-down order.  
_It’s a scale, sugarhead,_ Burns had said once when Hope had been bouncing around her for music. Right. A scale.  
“We should make a club,” Jet Star said. He looked up again when she looked back from where her attention had drifted over to the wall. He was smiling. “Fro power club.”  
“Nobody else around here has hair like us, though,” she said.  
“It’ll be an exclusive club, then. Like a mini-crew.” Jet Star held out his closed hand in what was clearly not a punch, offering it.  
Grace considered for a second. Then, fighting not to grin again (she wanted him to think she was at least _somewhat_ cucumber-cool), she carefully met his fist with hers.  
“Shiny,” Jet Star said approvingly. He shifted on the concrete block so he was turned a bit more towards her. He kept a hold on the guitar.  
“… can you teach me how to play guitar?” Grace asked. She felt sort of nervous asking—Burn had been really protective of her instruments-- but also, the guitar was just _there,_ and she’d never known how to make music before.  
Jet Star blinked. “Well sure,” he said, and then he shifted even more to face towards her. He seemed to consider it for a second, then took the guitar strap off of his shoulder and carefully held the guitar out towards her.  
Grace was pretty sure her eyes were as big as moons. She reached for the guitar was her hand angled kind of weirdly, not sure whether or not to hold it like a flat plate on her palms or like a blaster. She decided to cut her losses and go for both.  
Jet Star waited until she had a good handle on it and then gently let it go again.  
“It’s _heavy,_ ” Grace said. She didn’t drop it and the very thought that she might gave her scared-shudders all along the insides of her arms so she just laid it flat across her lap and spent a second looking at how cool it was.  
“Sure is,” Jet Star agreed. He’d leaned forward over his knees so that he was close enough to reach the  strings, she guessed, if he needed to. “Hell, if I haven’t taught someone this in a long time. But the first thing you should know about guitars is that there’s a couple different kinds. This one, it’s electric. We need a bangbox to plug it into if we want to hear it properly.”  
“Do you have one?”  
Jet Star shook his head, but he didn’t look too upset by it. “Not here, negative. The better news is we don’t need a bangbox to _play_ the thing. Try ‘em.”  
The guitar strings gave a satisfyingly teethy _twang._  Grace rubbed her thumb with her other fingers where it’d hummed from the instrument and she grinned.

  
The rest of the Fabulous Killjoys rolled back in around sunset, like Jet Star had advised that they would. By that time Jet was talking Grace through using scales. Fun Ghoul, Party Poison and lastly Kobra Kid came tramping along. They were all carrying red cans with white bottlecap lids—except for Ghoul, who had a orange lid on the on he was carrying. They rolled the Am into the garage, then walked out in a pack out to the old pumps and deposited the jugs they were carrying into a metal box that Grace had only guessed before held some kind of defunct electric wires. It swung open from a seam along the side that, additionally, she would never have guessed was a seam. That was probably the point.  
Jet Star and Grace watched from the inside of the diner, where they’d relocated after some threatening-looking clouds had loomed over part of the freeway right on track to roll over their heads. Grace had tried to call the cat into the diner, too, but the cat startled, its ears pricked backwards, and then disappeared off the end of the canister. Grace had only seen it crawl under the gas tank through a space so small it seemed bizarre that anything could fit under it. She guessed, if nothing else, it would be dry under there, plus safe if the rain turned out to have acid in it. It had been a cat longer than she ever had, obviously, and it was still here.  
“Guzzoline jugs,” Jet Star explained offhand. She was sitting on one of the booth’s tables, and he was sitting in the booth himself, tapping out beats on the table demonstratively while she tried to keep up with the strings.  
“Oh,” Grace said. That was good to know, but she also didn’t care very much because she was focusing on the instrument on her lap.  
“We get it out by the borders,” he said. “Some of the station ghouls take carbons for biofuels, they’re not supposed to sell to ‘nybody but Dracs but they don’t care so much if you have enough C’s.”  
Grace strummed a C chord on the guitar, then looked up through her bangs to see if she was doing it right.  
Jet Star laughed, surprised. “That’s pretty good, roadgoblin. Hey--” There was the clatter of several pairs of boots as the others tramped in through the emergency exit door. “—‘joys, check it out, the youngling’s learning how to string sing.”  
“Really? How’d--” Fun Ghoul sounded happy about it, and surprised, but his expression changed pretty quick. “Aw, goblin, you don’t have to pack just ‘cause we showed up.”  
Grace didn’t say anything back, though; she was too busy taking the strap off of her shoulder and then putting the precious twist of metal and electricity and plastic on the table, where Jet could reach it easily. She knew that killjoys didn’t really say thanks but still, she figured this was a different situation than usual. “Thanks,” she said to Jet Star, who only nodded, looking surprised, but not like he’d been surprised a minute ago. Then Grace carefully shifted backwards and swung her feet over the edge of the table, landing easily enough to keep her moving.  
  
She wove through the three killjoys who were standing in various stages of confusion or disappointment—except for Kobra, who was counting piles of carbons on the counter and didn’t notice her walk by.  
Grace didn’t relax until she’d made it out of the side-door of the diner, her shoes sinking into the newly-softened dust. Then she breathed out, letting her shoulders slump. She looked around for a rock to kick, or something, but nothing was there so she just turned around and idly kicked the heavily spraypainted wall.  
It wasn’t that she was _scared_ of the Fabulous killjoys, anymore. Not unless one of them was real blasted on some party-poppers or another and started being loud, but that hadn’t happened today. It was just that… she didn’t like all of them looking at her at once. It was scary, honestly. All of a sudden the diner felt too small around her shoulders and her heart started kickdrumming, so she had to leave.  
Grace sighed, stopping kicking the wall and turning around to lean against it. Her knees were crackling after being under the wait of the guitar for so long, and her hands felt like they were buzzing. She hoped that Jet Star would let her practice again, on a different day maybe. Did he leave the guitar behind when he wasn’t behind? “He’s gotta,” she said out loud to herself. “There’s no room to keep it.”  
The desert hummed its after-rain noises to itself. If Grace had her gun, she would’ve set up some rocks and flotsam out and then shot them out one by one. Hope had been better at that than her, having gotten used to firing so much faster, but the six yeaer old hadn’t noticed how serious it all really was.  
Thinking of her sister punctured the little balloon of happiness that had been filling in her chest. She stretched out her arms into the sky, looking at it through the frame of her fingers. It looked the same as every other sky.  
She didn’t want to go back into the diner. Along with the heavy-walls feeling, embarrassment started rushing through her head, pushing her thoughts in circles. She needed to get over whatever the full-room problem was. They were going to think she was reporting to somebody or something out here, one of these days.  
If she had Gear, she could play in the scrub grass. That seemed like a fair enough deal.  
  
Grace held her breath when she went back inside, creeping through the door; then relaxed. The four killjoys were in the garage, exclaiming loudly over something or another. She quickly scurried to her booth, grabbed the entire bag—then reconsidered, she didn’t want them to think that she was going to bail or anything. Instead she only grabbed Gear, settling the bag down carefully in the corner of the seat, and then escaped outside again.  
It was a good day, though, she thought to herself as she took her robot along a vertical walk up the back brick wall. “I can play guitar,” she told Gear, like a secret.  
Gear didn’t nod, but it did wave acknowledgment when she moved its arm. It was almost enough.  


*

 

Grace got a chance to show off her new talent a couple days later. It was a surprise, almost. Poison came blowing into the diner and told everybody, “We got a radio on the way in, the Cobras want us to meet them near the mothership. Everybody suit up, yeah?”

Whatever that meant, it sent everyone into a flurry of moving. Grace looked around, confused. “What?”

Poison leaned back out of the supply room where, apparently, some of his jackets had ended up. “What?”

“Why is--” Grace shut up, shaking her head. “Nevermind.”

 

She got it. The Fabulous crew operated differently than the junk punks. Obviously. They didn’t mainly trade and party; they tripped and took jobs from people. Sometimes the jobs were dangerous, like the kind of dangerous that people—specifically, Poison--don’t invite a kid on. That was why so many of the killjoys were gone for so long, most of the time. It made sense.

But, apparently, the one that they were all flying to get to on time right now was fine. “We’re just seeing the Cobras,” Jet explained when she asked him in the garage, as they all pulled their final bits of gear on. “And maybe run into the Parises, too.”

“Depends if they’re there,” Kobra said from the other side of the garage, where he was doing some stretches so his legs would cramp up less after an hour or two of sitting in the car. He’d gotten dressed up a little, too, added shadow to his face and picked different boots than he had usually. Whoever the Cobras were, seeing them was a big deal you had to have big looks for.

As Poison explained, “Image is important, honey. We’re not the motherfucking Fabulous crew for nothing. Kobra, where’s those pants of yours that have the rip on the knee, I need them? And where’s my other jacket—no not the black one, my fucking _red_ jacket.”

 

Grace didn’t really have that much special-shiny to wear. For a minute, she wished she did. She tried anyway, making an effort to scrub her face clean with the sleeve of her jacket, and then she got into the car with the rest of them.

 

 

It took a while to get to where they were going. None of the sunshines had told Grace where exactly they were going. She had to assume that was on purpose. Grace thought about it, while they drove. With a name like “the Cobras”, there wasn’t a big chance that the crew they were all about to meet up with were super nice to new kids. Or old kids. Snakes bit and poisoned, and, apparently, expected high fashion. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting from a name like that, like as far as actual people could be.

The Cobras as they turned out to be weren’t exactly it.

 

Poison pulled the Am over, finally, and everyone stepped out onto a mirror. That was what it looked like: the sky overhead, and the sky on the ground, stretching on and on and one in all directions in front of them. Grace stared at it, then looked at the others. “What is it?”

“Salt flats,” Kobra said. He gestured towards the east, vaguely. “Before BLI figured out how to recycle ocean water, they tried it out here--”

“Used to be a lake,” Ghoul interrupted. “The sun sucked out all the water a long while back, though, except like—” Ghoul pinched his thumb and finger together. “That gets caught on the flat when the acid rain comes down. S’what makes the mirror. But don’t try to go drink any of it.”

“Duh,” Grace said. She wouldn’t’ve done that anyway.

Ghoul smile approvingly, then stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back against the Am for a minute, even though everyone could feel the heat coming off it in waves. Grace could _see_ the heat coming off it in waves. Ghoul had a few screws loose.

“Yeah,” Kobra admitted grudgingly, about the dried lake.

“Ready up, guys,” Jet called over.

 

Grace looked up and it seemed like the Cobras were just, suddenly, there. There in double, at that, because they were walking on the edge of the salt flats and were reflected from their boots-up in the water. All four of them were dressed in white, which would immediately flash danger alarms in Grace’s brainpan except that they had _instruments._ Guitars, slung across two of their backs, and one thing that looked kind of like a guitar except it was black and white and more like a rectangular than a curve. They were close enough that Grace could tell one of them seemed to be a sugarspice; she was the one with the weird thing that wasn’t a guitar, and she had a skirt on instead of the long white pants that the others did, and a bright purple smile on her pale face. She’d dyed a piece of her otherwise brown hair purple to match, from end to end.    

Grace smiled at her, without even meaning too, really. The sugarspice caught her eye and smiled back.

The Cobras were close enough to them and the Am that it only took them about half a minute of dramatically walking by the acid-water-mirror to reach them. The Fabulous crew had moved into a V formation and Grace had fallen in place, automatically. It was her at the back, Ghoul and Kobra beside her, Jet and Poison up front. Poison the closest to the Cobras, of course. He was the best talker out of all of them. He called out a greeting to the tall, skinny sunshine who was leading the pack.

The Cobra grinned, spreading his arms. The rest of them came up close behind him, clustering, not like they were expecting a fight but like it’d be breaking some kind of code to move forwards now. “The Fabulous killjoys! Living up to your names, good to see, good to see. Party Poison, today? Milkshake. And the Star of Zone Six; grimy Ghoul; Kobra with a ‘k’. And you brought the new addition, too,” the Cobra said agreeably. “Oh, don’t look like that, everyone’s heard of your goblin acquisition by now.” His grin changed to a kind of smirk, which softened a little as he put his hands on his hips and looked towards Grace. Like, right at her. This happened too much. “Good to see you, sweetshot.”

Grace had no idea what to say. The sunshine didn’t seem like he’d stab her given the chance, like the Possum had, but she also had no idea who this sunshine was. She’d learned better than to just blurt stuff out, too, after the Dumps. She decided to just not say anything. She put a hand on her hip, and raised her chin.

The Cobra laughed approvingly. “Fair enough.” He turned away from her, towards Jet. “Anyhow, to business, right? How’s it shaking this while, Jet Star.”

 

What exactly that meant, Grace had no idea and wouldn’t find out, because the other Cobras seemed to figure that now that their ringleader had made it known that they knew everybody there, it was a good time to disperse from the tight group they’d made behind him. They spread out into the ranks of Grace’s crew, blocking the lead Cobra and Jet Star from Grace’s sight, and started talking to the others.

The taller sunshine Cobra walked up to Ghoul and started shooting the shit about some roadmap or another, while the other went to Kobra and enacted some kind of complicated handshake.

The lady Cobra walked up Grace, who quickly untucked her hands from her jean pockets where she might've been hiding a weapon. Since it seemed like they were all milkshake now, after a split second of deciding she just put them in her jacket pockets instead.

“Looking alive,” the Cobra said, smiling her purple smile. “I’m Vicky-T, motorgoblin.”  

“Shiny,” Grace replied, with a smile of her own again. She knew from the couple seconds that Vicky was expecting her to introduce herself, but. But.

“It’s not often we see a mini-spice out here,” Vicky-T said, after the seconds had passed. “That’s pretty milkshake. You’ve been with these ‘joys for a while now? You like ‘em all?” 

“A blink or two,” Grace agreed. “They’re alright.”

Vicky-T laughed. “That’s good to hear.” She adjusted her instrument’s strap on her shoulder.

Grace stared at it for a second, which Vicky-T caught onto. “Fly got your throat?”

A little embarrassed, Grace shook her head quickly. “No. But I never saw a guitar like that before.”

Vicky-T nodded, grinning. “That’s ‘cause it’s a keytar,” she said, “A guitar’s shinier cousin.”

“Wow,” Grace said, and she meant it.

“Very wow.” Vicky-T looked leisurely around at the others, and then gestured for Grace to follow her. “There’s someone you should totally meet back at our bus.”

 Grace stepped forwards, and then paused, looking around a little nervously. Poison and Jet were still talking seriously to the lead Cobra, Ghoul and the other in deep conversation still. Grace stepped over to Kobra and tugged on his sleeve for a second.

Kobra turned fast with a frown, but didn’t flinch; he had his glasses on, like usual, so she couldn’t tell if he was looking fast between her and Vicky-T or not. It seemed like it though.

“She’s meeting me with someone,” Grace said, and Kobra nodded.

“Sounds shiny, motorgoblin,” Kobra replied, and then turned back to the sunshine he’d been talking to.

 

A little more relaxed that at least someone would know where she was going, Grace dropped her hand from Kobra’s arm and followed Vicky-T over to the Cobras’ bus.

It turned out that buses were kind of huge; Grace had no idea how she’d missed seeing that when her and the crew had rolled up here. She must’ve been too sidetracked by the salt-flat mirror. She guessed that that was probably part of the point. The thing was at least twice the size of the Trans Am from end to end, and double as tall too. It looked like it’d been reddish once, but the sun and sand had bleached or burned it until that was mostly a hint under the brown.

The person that Vicky-T wanted her to meet was sitting on a thin metal box that was leaning against the side of the bus, with yet another guitar in her lap. She was white, wearing mostly blue and maybe-black clothes except for some red gloves, with her long brown hair scooped back in a pony tail, and she’d cut it real short on one side of her head. She looked up and her eyes were lined with dark, and she was smiling. She looked like a junk punk. Grace’s heart hurt for a second before realizing that there was no way the sugarspice was someone she knew.

“Lynn The Gun,” she said agreeably when Vicky-T introduced Grace as “the new Fabulous motorbaby”. Her voice sounded like smoke, or like she inhaled a lot of smoke when she wasn’t talking.

Grace smiled at her, too. Again she wished that she had something shiny to say, but instead she just said, “Milkshake” again.

“C’mere, sit down, there’s enough room.” Lynn nodded approvingly when Grace shrugged and sat down beside her. The box had been covered with some kind of drape that looked like it was about a hundred years old, so it didn’t burn so much on her legs.

“So you’re under Vicky’s wing now too, huh?” Lynn asked, crooking one side of her mouth up.

Grace looked between her and Vicky for a second. Vicky-T laughed. “Not just now,” she said, “But soon. Soon.” She steepled her hands together and smiled like she was thinking of something evil.

Grace giggled.

“She’s a cutie,” Lynn said, smiling again. She strummed something on the guitar. “Hey, d’you want to try some moves?”

“Huh?” Grace looked over and then realized that the sugarspice was offering her the guitar. “Oh, totally!” She took the guitar carefully, and accepted Lynn’s gloves when she handed them over too, so she wouldn’t burn her hands off on the brass strings. She paused for a second, then started picking out the tunes that Jet Star had helped her with, before. After a minute she looked up, nervous.

But both sugarspices were nodding at her. “You’re a natural,” Vicky-T said approvingly. “The Fabulous ones won’t notice if we kidnap you, right?” She poked Grace’s shoulder, and Grace laughed again.

 

When it was time for them to leave, someone signalled over to Vicky-T, who told the others.  
Grace didn't want to leave the sun-warmed bench or the company, but she didn't have a choice. She high-fived Lynn The Gunn goodbye, let Vicky-T poke her shoulder and smile encouragingly at her. When she got into the Trans Am Grace had a smile on her face.

  
The others noticed. Ghoul smiled back at her, full of joy, and Jet laughed. “You like the girls?” He asked. “I saw you showing them your guitar skills.” He sounded proud.  
Grace _felt_ proud. “They’re awesome,” she bubbled. She scuffed her feet against the carpet, back and forth. “Lynn showed me songs she’d made up herself, and Vicky said that she could teach me the—the thing she plays, she said that she could teach me how to play it next time I see them, but it wasn’t working right then because it needed power to play and they hadn’t laid out the solar cells in too long, because they’d been driving and then meeting up with—”  
  
Grace took a breath, and then paused. She’d been going to say ‘meeting up with _us_ ’, but… it hadn’t been that long since she’d woken up confused and barefoot in the small side-room in the diner. She wasn’t sure if the word ‘us’ fit with her, yet. If she fit with all of them.  
“Anyway,” Ghoul said, pushing on, maybe trying to fill the gap in what Grace had been going to say and what she realized in the middle of it. “But you liked the Cobras?”  
Grace hadn’t talked to most of them, except the sugarspices. She shrugged, suddenly not feeling like saying much—or like she’d said too much, really. “They seem shiny,” she tried.  
“As chrome,” Jet Star said.  
Poison spoke up from the front. “Seatbelts on, everybody, ‘fore your brain goes through the glass.” He hit the gas a split second later, and they were off down the road again.

 


	6. Striking

Grace wandered back inside after using the latrine, rubbing the tiredness from her eyes and wishing she could rub it from her brain. The desert had been the kind of scorching that made you tired, lately.

The inside of the diner wasn’t any cooler than the outside but it had more stuff to do, and someone to talk to. Kobra was sat at one of the booths with his pile of work tech in front of him, as well as the glove he seemed to always have attached to his arm when they went out. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, for the second time that Grace could remember.

Maybe because it was cloudy outside that day. Hazy, too. Grace’s eyes only adjusted from the outside because she’d blinked a whole ton, squinting into the room. She went over to the table he was sitting at and leaned on it. “Hi,” she yawned. “Where’s your glasses?”

Kobra Kid looked up at her, raising his eyebrows. One of his eyes, the right one, was a light kind of green; but the other eye was a lot more brown.

Grace hadn’t seen anyone like that before. “Your eyes are different,” she said.

“I noticed that, too,” he said. He didn’t sound angry, just kind of amused. He sounded like that a lot.

“Good,” Grace said. “It’s a good thing to know.” He’d seen her and not shooed her away, so she slid into the booth opposite him, ‘cause she could. She crossed both her legs up on the seat, and then both her arms on the table, slouching over so she could rest her chin on her wrists.

  
They’d been alone in the diner for two days, by that point, minus the nights when the rest came back of course. Kobra Kid had a two-way radio by him all the time. Sometimes it burbled out music from the radio pirate the Fabulous Killjoys preferred—Doctor Death-Defying—and sometimes it was just static. Kobra kept it open for the couple rings a day from the others, just updates on where they were and where they were going. Grace guessed that if he didn’t hear from them a certain number he’d go out and---do something. Avenge them, maybe, or call backup in. So far that hadn’t happened. She hoped it never did.  
Right then, the radio was burbling out a song that sounded like static but only because it’d been recorded that way, along with someone singing about listening to the radio all the time in a warm house, _la la la_. The DJ was feeling quiet and drivey today.  
“What’re you doin’?” She asked. She knew better than to try and pick at whatever it was someone else was picking at, but she was still curious. The bends and wires that Kobra fixed up whenever he set up his worktable looked like Acid’s bombs use to, but obviously they weren’t.  
“Fixing,” Kobra said. He paused, then looked up from where he was fussing with two spark-makers and raised his chin towards her. “What’cha got there?”  
Grace took her blaster out of her belt loop where she’d stashed it, just to show she had it. (Of course she didn’t keep her hand on the trigger switch; she’d known better than that, at the very least.) “I found it,” she said. “You stashed it under the sink. Or one of you, if it wasn’t actually you-you.”

 

She had found her blaster the night before, when Kobra and Poison had gone for a perimeter and Jet Star and Ghoul were talking in the garage over the Am. The gun was okay, and she’d been happy to see it; less happy to see her apparently broken knife which had been stashed next to the gun. The butterfly knife was rusted at the hinge, so at least she knew that they hadn’t broken it on purpose. She wondered how long it had been busted. She’d wrapped it up in one of her old shirts—she was wearing the Hectic Glow one that one of the junk punks had gifted her—and put the butterfly knife back into her messenger bag so wrapped, because she didn’t want to throw it out. She knew that rust in a sharp thing meant it being no good but a knife was a knife and could be useful. (And it was a reminder of Lane, anyway.) Her blaster, thankfully, had been perfectly fine.

“Why’d you hide it?” She asked Kobra.

“’Cause you couldn’t use it,” he said. “Needs some charge,” Kobra added, looking back down to his work. His face looked more angled without his glasses, but less fly-like. His hair flopped into his face more.  
Grace looked at her blaster, noting with some disappointment (she felt her stomach sour a little) that it did, in fact, need another battery pack soon if she wanted to shoot it anywhere. She hooked it back through her belt, and then looked back up. Kobra was still being attentive; the radio had switched songs beside him. She started tapping on the table with her fingers.  
“Quit it,” Kobra said without looking up. “Busy.”  
Grace frowned, but stopped tapping on the table. She looked down at her boring, ‘not doing anything useful’ fingers for a minute or so and then shoved herself away from the table. “’m going outside,” she grumbled. She would maintain steadfastedly later that she had not stomped, if anyone asked. But, she thought to herself a little sadly that crackled around the edges with angrily, nobody was probably going to ask.  
  
Outside she tried not to waste her time. She was already getting a little tired of the dinwer and the edgtes around it, and she couldn’t deal with wandering very much anymore. At least now that she had her blaster it felt easier to walk the weight less of a physical object and more an assurance of protection on her hip. Batteries or not, if someone rolled up on the horizon without being someone that Grace knew she could blast them into a century, with at least two good shots.  
  
Some things you do just to see how bad they make you feel. Grace didn’t want to kick to the back wall of the diner again, her feet still hurt from the last time, and it didn’t make any sense anyway that she would be this upset by somebody not wanting to talk to her exactly when she felt like talking to them. Maybe it was because had it had gone pretty okay with Jet Star the time that both of them had hung out together the whole day; she couldn’t really help but want all of the Fabulous Killjoys to talk to her in the same chill, not-talking-to-a-flight-risk way he had started to when she had wanted to learn to play the guitar.  
Grace sighed out loud, then ducked around the corner of the diner to check by the gas tank. She had stashed a mean Neat Solution in her picket before she had left for the latrine, since that was what the others- Jet, maybe, but then again maybe it was Kobra—had left out on the counter of the diner that morning. She had a Meat Solution can her jacket. She’d already eaten some, but she had still left  the  apartment for about half for the cat. She didn’t have an idea of when they would be out by the can, or anything, but she could guess the test; the cat seemed to preen more. The almost graduating started to go by the beach with them when it was least dangerous. At the very least when it hadn’t hit the central login in the sky yet, except it wasn’t too hot. Grace didn’t know f the meat would spook it not, ‘cause she had no idea what the hell was, but he didn’t want to make the cat sick or anything; that would be horrible.  
The cat wasn't there right then; that was okay. She'd been checking the tank a little bit after e TY time she put it out and there was always nothing left in it, and she didn't know any other animals who could get up there e cepy maybe a raccoon, which there weren't any of around the diner or she would have seen them by now.  Grace climbed up and left the can she'd saved up there right where she usually did. She wasn't really that hungry anymore anyway.  
She had climbs back down and started a counter-clickwise, or right turned, walk around the diner. She found some loose ricks to toss as far into  the waving thin desert grasses as she could to see if she could scare up any birds. She had just started back around the finer when she heard the front glass doors squeak open and glass crunch under (a certain) someone's feet.

 

Still on the other side of the building, Kobra called, "Hey?"  
_Now you have time_ , Grace thought a little sourly. She argued with herself for a moment whether or not to answer. Then she decided that hiding was something a little kid would do, anyway, and she marched herself around the building to where it sounded like Kobra Kid was talking from. He wasn’t right by the front doors, so she turned north towards the pumps to see if he was hanging out in the mild shadow there.  
  
It turned out he must have had a idea just like hers. They almost ran into each other going around the first concrete-box pillar, both of them grabbing for their own blaster at the same time. Once Kobra saw what had happened, he relaxed and looked like he was going to laugh again. "All that for nothing, " he said, putting his blaster back into the holster. "Buzz in your helmet, honey?"  
"What even is that? Poison says that, not you. "  
Kobra shrugged. "Ghoul and I said why yesterday," he said. "You use partner words sometimes. It's a hazard. Why'd you stomp out?"  
"Why do you care," Grace said sullenly.  
Kobra raise his eyebrows. "Usually when people stomp out they're upset," he said. "It's helpful to know if something's up with your crewmates before there's a firefight someone's fed up during."  
Grace opened her mouth to respond and then caught onto the fact that Kobra had said they were crewmates. She had no idea what to deal with that. "You didn't want to talk to me," she said. Saying it it loud it felt a little stupid; something a little kid would actually do.  
"I was working," Kobra said. Like it was super obvious. (She noticed that he didn’t really look at her when she was talking, or when he was talking, just looked above her shoulder or over into the distance, or actually at her but like higher like on the top of her hair. But maybe that was just ‘cause he was taller than her.) “If I’m busy I’m busy.”  
“Well you still could’ve said something,” Grace said. She was, maybe, a little stung about it. But if he was busy—and he had been, she remembered the concentration on his face when he was tying the wires into one piece—that didn’t mean that he hadn’t wanted her to be in the diner, or anything. She uncrossed her arms and stuck them in the pockets of her jeans instead.  
“Could’ve should’ve would’ve,” he said, and then shrugged again. “What’d you want?” Kobra asked, flicking his hair out of his face.  
“… I wanted to know if you wanted to play cards,” Grace said. It was tempting to mumble but she didn’t. “Or something.” Again, just saying it outright sounded stupid. She looked at her boots and stepped on some little dustmite that was right by her toe. Not super hard; it crawled out from under her foot perfectly fine a second later. She imagined that it would have a really high voice. (She remembered how often she’d had to yell at Hope not to touch all the gross bugs that hung out in the cracks under Murder City.)  
“Cards?” Kobra Kid asked, a small tinge of surprise in his voice.  
“Yeah. You’ve played before, haven’t you?” Grace said. She looked back up. “Jet found—or, Jet showed me that you guys had some in the back room the other day.” Kobra didn’t say anything for a second. “You don’t have to if you have something else to do,” she said.  “Or whatever.”

  
“Cards are alright,” Kobra said. He scratched his shoulder which was still in his jacket despite the sun being kept behind a cloudscreen today, and spent a second or so gazing up and down the road from where they stood.  
“You’re done working now?” Grace put in, a little mollified.  
“Never,” Kobra said, but he said it with something resembling a smile so maybe it was a joke. He repeated, “Cars are alright.” Then he said, “If there’s anybody gonna roll up we’ll see them from the front window. You know where they are?”  
_The window? Of course I know where it is,_ Grace thought, and then realized. “Yeah! I mean, yeah,” she said, trying to cover up the excitement she’d had for a second there. Kobra always sounded collected; or not always, but a lot of the time. She should try and talk more like him when she was around him. “I’ll go get them.”  
“Lead in,” Kobra replied, making a _go and I’ll follow_ motion with his hand.  
  
Kobra Kid was like Ghoul in that he seemed happy enough to talk to her, Grace thought, but he was also not like Ghoul in that he didn’t talk to her very much. Even if she asked questions he usually answered with two words, or one word, if that was all that he needed. She’d heard him talking easy enough to the other killjoys especially about electronics, so maybe it was only that talking to (who he must see as) a desert sprout made him use small words. She hoped that wasn’t it. She’d have to stop talking to him at all if he thought like that.  
But maybe, she thought as she slid into the same booth that Kobra had been sitting at earlier, maybe it was just that Kobra didn’t feel like talking too much sometimes.  
He seemed okay enough with, like, doing stuff, and if he didn’t like Grace or thought she was too little to be around he wouldn’t be okay with playing cars with her. Right? That made sense; when Grace or any of the junk punks didn’t like people they avoided the hell out of them like they were a plague. But Kobra seemed to genuinely be cool with cards. He’d cleared away the ends and odds of the tech from the booth’s table into just one corner of the seat beside him—the corner part, so it wouldn’t fall out. He’d also stuck his glasses on again. “Right or left?” He said, as Grace sat down and then scooted over so they were sitting opposite each other.  
“Huh?”  
“Do you shuffle right or left,” he explained.  
Grace looked down at the cards in her hand. They’d been held together by an ancient-looking piece of twine, which hadn’t actually helped very much since it was almost totally frayed in like seven places. She’d had to pick up most of the cards off of the storage room’s floor herself, instead of just grabbing the whole deck all at once. “I shuffle them in a pile,” she said.  
Kobra shook his head, the same almost-smile he’d had in the station lot. He held his hand out for the cards. Grace passed them over, curious, and then watched as Kobra demonstrated skillfully how to shuffle the cards right-handed. (He held them all in his right hand, dropped about half of them to his left and then sort of waterfalled them back and forth.) “Ghoul can do left-handed a little,” he said. “Our con Cherry can do left hand for real.”  
“Oh,” Grace said. She took the newly shuffled deck back when he passed them over. “So what do you want to play?”  
“Eights?”  
“Okay.” She dealt the cards, counting fast in her head, and then put the rest of the deck on the table between them so she could reach it and so could Kobra. She flipped the top card from the deck over and put it beside the deck, face-up. She picked her card-hand up with both hands, holding them in a fan like Burn had used to and fanned herself for a second, mostly for show.  
Kobra huffed a short ‘ha’ into his own card hand. He held them fanned out, too, but only in his left hand. His other hand he kept on the table. He glanced at the eight of squares on the table and then selected a card from his hand. “Where’d you learn to play?” He asked her, putting it down and then picking up the top one from the deck.   
Grace selected her own card and then picked one up from the deck’s pile for her turn. “I learned--” Again, how much did she want him to know? But he’d heard what Sid Skid Mark had said. And did it matter? It might. “I learned from my friends,” she finished, deciding to go the middle road in how truthful she wanted to be. “They had the same kind of thing, I mean, deck. They drew theirs themselves too.” He put down a two; she glared at him, a little, as she picked up double what she would have otherwise. “There’s were better though.”  
“Poison would argue,” Kobra said easily. He re-arranged some of the cards in his hand.  
“They were, though.” The junk punks had spent more time playing cards while they were stuck inside the old school because of heat or storms than they had spent time doing anything else while they were stuck inside. The cards that they played with had looked kind of old, but that could have just been because they’d been taken out so regularly. Grace realized with a pang that she’d never asked who had cut out the cardboard or who had drawn on all the symbolisms; she never would get too, now. “They had a bunch of colour and really smooth lines,” she said, focusing on her cards and on the table so she wouldn’t start to do something distracting like cry. One of her cards was cut into what was definitely a diamond, and it didn’t even belong to the diamond suit. (Sticks, diamonds, circles and squares.) “All of the edges were the same shape.”   
“Hmm,” Kobra said. He put down a crown card, with the ‘Q’ beside it designating it a queen, and then picked up again.  
“And all the crown cards had pictures of people,” Grace added. “Not just little tiaras.”  
“Hmm.”

They played in quiet for a little while.

 “You talk a lot more when you’re by yourself with somebody,” Kobra said when the deck was half on the table and half in their respective hands.  
“What?” Grace asked, looking up.  
“You talk more with one,” he repeated. “You’ve got so many words in your fluffhead, but you don’t share them with more than a person.”  
Grace chewed on her lower left lip and shrugged. “Why do you stay back whenever everyone else is out getting stuff done?” She asked instead of answering. (Though it wasn’t even really not answering; the sun-haired sunshine hadn’t really even asked a question, just said something he thought was true.) It was, after all, basically one of the only things she knew about the killjoy, that Kobra stayed behind while the others went out.  
Kobra considered his hand and then put two same-number cars on top of each other, black to slightly less deep black, squares to triangles. “’s crew business,” he said. “Most of the time. Poison’s the face. Ghoul gets antsy if he doesn’t get out enough, got a girl to meet too. Jet makes sure shit runs as smooth as it can. Somebody’s gotta stay here.”   
“Don’t you get bored here?” Grace asked. “Or—like, don’t you feel like they’re leaving you behind?”  
Kobra considered for another minute. Grace couldn’t tell if he was looking at his cards or not. “Negative,” he said finally. “It’s still a crew job. Somebody’s gotta stay here,” he said, again. “If some nobody’s show up, or anyone else who shouldn’t be. Or anybody else who’d be cool to be here, but can’t tell us before they show.” He put down an eight. “Sticks. There’s lots for me to do. ‘m the one who points them where to roll.”  
“Why you?” Grace asked.  
Kobra Kid shrugged, again, just a twitch of his shoulders. “People know me,” he said.  
“But you said Poison’s the face, and you--” Grace stopped.  
“And me?”  
“… you don’t talk much,” she finished, a little embarrassed. She knocked the backs of her feet against the booth’s baseboard like it would help.  
“I’m talking to you.” Kobra picked up a card and then re-organized his hand.  
“Well. Yeah.” Grace held her card-hand a little higher so, hopefully, her red face wouldn’t be as visible obvious. She had a two of sticks, so she put it down.

The deck was getting real low; one of them would have to win soon.

Abruptly, she wanted to have a plan for when they’d finished. Kobra hadn’t said anything but she thought that, maybe, he was kind of bored with the game. Or he would be once it was finished. “Hey,” she said, “Do you want to bet?”  
“Huh?”  
“On the cards,” she said. “Who wins.”  
“… well, sure,” he replied. He adjusted his fly-eye glasses, wiping some sweat off of the side of his head absently. “What d’you wanna bet?”  
_Crap,_ Grace thought. She looked around for a second. She didn’t have any carbons, and there wasn’t anything in her messenger bag she would want to trade with anybody.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the door into the supply room. She remember the case that Jet Star had carefully put the electric guitar to sleep in the couple days before, after she had snuck back in with Gear to find that the four killjoys were starting to wind down into sleep (and one keeping watch, of course). “How about a song?”

Kobra shook his head. “Can’t sing worth shit,” he said. He was smiling with the corner of his mouth again, so maybe it was a good idea after all.  
“A story, then, how about,” she said. “You know those, right? It doesn’t have to be--” What had Mama called hers? She couldn’t remember. “It doesn’t have to be super huge, or anything, just a story. You do know one?”  
Kobra snorted. “Everyone knows. Sure, sugarhead.”  
Okay, good. “Milkshake.” Grace studied her cards for a second, and then she noticed him putting the tips of his fingers on the pile that was under the currently playing on card (a six of squares), instead of on the deck with the hidden cards that you were supposed to pick from when you were playing Eights. “No cheating!” She blurted, narrowing her eyes.  
Kobra pulled back his hand, an actual grin on his face. “Had to see if you’re paying attention,” he said.  
Grace tried not to smile and was unsure how well it worked. She studied her own cards again, only looking up through her bangs when Kobra snickered again.

Five turns later, Kobra put his last card—the crown of circles--down triumphantly. “Hope you’ve got a good one to tell,” he said.  
“I do,” Grace said, a little defensively. She’d been thinking of what she would say if she had lost, since it had been a pretty even card game up until the last turns, and she had picked one that the junk punks had told her on one of the long drives.  
  
Kobra stood up, so Grace blinked and stood up too, a little uncertainly but not enough to stop talking. “My friends told it to me one time when we were on a drive,” she said. “It’s about these two people, but--”  
“Are you telling it now?” Kobra was stretching his arms one at a time.  
“Well, no,” she said, a bit put off. She stuck her hands in her pockets. “I just—wanted to make sure you’d like it.”  
Kobra looked over at her, then nodded. “Thoughtful of you, youngling,” he said. “I’ve gotta check the edges, you coming?”  
That was why he’d gotten up. “Sure,” Grace said, nodding and taking her hands out of her pockets, since walking with your hands occupied was a good way to get a facefull of sand which could cut up your eyes pretty bad. She felt for her blaster and was glad, very suddenly and specifically, of its weight on her hip.  
Kobra had raised his eyebrows at her again. He turned on his heel, and she took two fast steps to follow.  
  
“So it’s… it’s a true story, like, it happened. It’s a story about these two people—they’re in a city,” she said as they walked out of the diner through the side garage door. “Not Battery, a different city, an old one that was up before any of the—before the war happened.” (Grace had never seen a city like that that she remembered, but the junk punks had assured her that they were real.) “And they’re in love.”  
  
Grace hadn’t made up a story in a long time. Not one that you actually told people, anyway; she had lied a bunch of times, and lying was only really telling stories, but an actual one that had people in it and a beginning plus middle plus end, telling one like that was harder. Even though she’d heard it before. She hoped she hadn’t forgotten anything important—but it was kind of her story now, she guessed. Petra wasn’t there to tell it, and it hadn’t been Petra’s to start anyway. The important thing was that Kobra kept looking at her on and off, as they went around the perimeter of the killjoy’s territory. If he was bored by the story, she probably would have seen him look around them instead of over at her while she was telling it.  
The perimeter turned out to be a lot bigger than just a rough square that stretched out from the sides of the diner itself to the place the latrine was and up to the end of the pumps by the highway. By the time they got to the tree that Kobra Kid said marked the edge of only one part of the Fabulous Killjoys’ ground, Grace’s feet were stinging like she had stepped on an ants’ nest without wearing any sneakers. Also, she was almost out of words and breath to say them with. So when Kobra Kid stopped and leaned on the low-laying curved branch of the Joshua tree, Grace sat down gratefully too.  
She rubbed her nose, then continued, “But then he realized—he looked through the book of names he kept, after he’d washed off the blood, and he realized that he was only one off from the number he was supposed to get. And when he came out of the bathroom the devil was sitting on the bed again, and he realized that if he wanted to see his wife again the last evil he needed to kill was himself.” Grace remembered that Petra had said it better than she did. “ _S_ o he took the gun, that he’d used before up until the restaurant and then after he’d escaped from prison, and he put it up to the side of his head. And the devil smiled,” she finished.  
The words felt good, in the air, like she’d done them right. She smiled to herself for a second, then looked over and up to where Kobra was sitting.  

Kobra was looking down at her, but not directly at his face; he looked like he was studying the ground by her feet. He nodded a couple times, seemingly solemnly. “That’s a hell of a story,” he said finally.  
“Did you like it?” Grace asked. She scratched her arm a little, nervously.  
Kobra’s gaze shifted. “Positive,” he said after a minute. “Definitely worth a card win.”  
Grace smiled again, pleased.

“Where’d you say you heard that, roadgoblin?” Kobra said, wiping something non-existent off his jeans. He was always fidgeting, doing something.

“My friends,” Grace said. Then, she realized suddenly, maybe ‘friends’ sounded too… something. Too city. “My old crewmates,” she tried again.  
“Shiny,” he said. He focused on the horizon for a second. Then he said, “You believe in the devil, motorbaby?”  
Both the name (that wasn’t hers) and the question put Grace off for a second. She felt the smile slip off her face as she tried to pick a way to say what she was thinking. Her hands itched to hold something. Instead, she pressed her nails of her right hand into her left palm, methodically but not enough to even hurt, just thinking. “I do,” she said.  
“Why?”  
“Because a lot of other people do,” she said. She thought of her mother, so herself and committed to the City and the Industry’s type of life even after she had pulled Grace and Hope out of their beds to escape BLI; and she thought of Burns, them both learning how to speak Spanish when they were little, but otherwise probably the most different that Grace could think of people to be. Both of them had talked about the devil. “Different people,” Grace added to Kobra, “Who’d have no reason to talk about the same thing. And because part of it makes… sense. Like, him seeing you everywhere. There’s a lot of things that can see you everywhere,” Grace said. She curled her left palm into a fist and covered it with her other hand, like a little kidlet covering a fragile rock with a blanket.  
“A lot of things you can’t see,” Kobra mumbled.  
Grace still caught caught the mumble. She nodded. Something occurred to her: “Do you believe in the devil?” She asked Kobra.  
Kobra shrugged, looking up along the road. “I believe in the Witch,” he said, saying the ‘w’ like it was an important word, or the name in the sentence. “But they don’t cancel each other out, sometimes.”  
Grace nodded. “Why don’t you tell me a story,” was what she thought about saying, but then she realized how weird and childish that kind of sounded. So instead she said, “How about you?”  
“Huh?” Kobra still looked at the horizon line for a second, his sunglasses reflecting the road, then looked back in her direction.  
  
Grace stood up, brushing her pants off in case there was more dust than usual sticking to her. She didn’t know how long it was, but her feet had stopped feeling like they were buzzing, and they hadn’t brought any water or nothing so she kind of hoped they would get back to the diner soon. It was probably time for them to go back. “How about you share a yarn,” she elaborated. “A story,” she added, in case the Fabulous Killjoys didn’t use the word for stories that the junk punks had sometimes.  
Kobra paused for a second, then shrugged with one of his hands going into the air. That meant ‘might as well’, Grace was pretty sure. He stood up too, stretching again with a wince as he kept his right shoulder straighter for a second then the other, taking time like it was his idea. Then he said, “Alright. What’d’y want to hear?”  
Grace debated that for a minute as the two of them started walking again, this time following the highway road south west, back to the diner. The sun had sunk farther into the sky while they were walking but not far enough that it bothered Grace or got into her eyes. “About you,” she said eventually, cutting her eyes back at the killjoy.  
Kobra laughed. “Nice try but no,” he said. “You need to be at least a level four to unlock my backstory, small one.”  
Grace scowled. “Stop calling me that,” she replied.  
“Will when you’re bigger,” he replied. He tapped his side for the holster he kept there and then looked down. “Should’ve brought water,” he said. He pointed at her for a second. “That’s an important on walks, motorhead,” he said. “Especially perimeter sweeps.”  
Grace nodded. “That’s why I wanted to go back,” she said. Then she turned her head to hide her wince, not wanting to go back on what she’d said—‘cause it was true—but realizing how kind of petty that sounded.  
“You parched?” He asked.  
Grace nodded again.  
“We’ll get you some sweet stuff soon as we get in the door, then,” Kobra decided. He started lengthening his stride, then slowed back down as he realized she’d have to hurry to keep up if he walked fast. “I’ll show you how to bike the next times we’re out here, huh,” he said.

“… okay,” Grace said. Then added—“I mean, hell yeah.” A _bike!_ “That’d be shiny!” She said, enthused.  
Kobra smiled. “We’ve still gotta get back to the diner first,” he said. Then, cocking his head like he’d seen something in the distance, or like he was deciding something, Kobra said, “I’ll tell you about how Ghoul and Jet went somewhere and nearly drowned in thin air one time.”  
  
Drowned in thin air. Very suddenly Grace felt sick, and the world seemed to swim; she clenched her fists against the feeling, trying to deal with it without Kobra noticing what she was doing.  
“That sound milkshake?” Kobra asked, looking down at her while they walked.  
Grace couldn’t talk for the block in her throat, so she just nodded.

But she must have been better about hiding her tightened sad shoulders and clenched hands than she thought she was, because Kobra didn’t seem to notice.  
He looked forward again, easy as anything, and started explaining how it’d been Jet and Fun Ghoul alone one time when the rest of them hadn’t quite made a full crew just then. “They’d gone out to a fair by a Fuck You House, y’know, an actual one with no skinrippers in sight—and there was Tommy Chow Mein setting himself up with a booze tent…”  
     
By the time they’d gotten back to the diner proper Grace was breathing okay again, and her fingers had loosened from their crescent-moon indents on the insides of her hands. It had been a horrible thing to hear said, that one line, but when Kobra told it the story hadn’t been about sickness like Hope had had at all. It was just a drinking story. Fun Ghoul hadn’t—or maybe didn’t, Grace had never seen him party obviously—know how much shots of fireball alc he could deal with before he started seeing triple and quadruple, whereas Jet took full-mouth swallows of beer through a hose and then damned the consequences until he’d woken up the next morning with the weight of three cars sitting on his head. “That’s how he got his old name, ‘fore he switched it when he started with us,” Kobra said, peering up into the sky like the clouds had the answer. “Or when we all started rolling together, I guess.”  
“Huh,” Grace said. They were walking across the paved lot again and the feeling of the concrete was slightly different than the feel of the road underneath the soles of her boots. It felt real weird, but mostly she was just thinking of the way inside so she could get some water. She looked between the front doors and the garage doors, then started leaning towards the garage one. They were crossing the lot crosswides, from the lefthand corner; it’d be faster to go through the garage.  
An idea sizzled through her head. “I bet I can get into the diner before you do,” she blurted, spinning on her heel to face Kobra Kid where he was still walking straight on across the lot to the main doors.  
“What?”  
“I bet I can beat you to the inside,” Grace said. She grinned, feeling the pump of excitement in getting somewhere and winning something buzz through her.  
“Do you real--”  
“Go!”  
  
Grace spun on her heel again and sprinted across the lot. She heard Kobra’s surprised swear behind her and then the sound of boots on gravel, thumping their way to the front door even still. Grace focused on moving her arms and her feet at the same time, not landing super hard on the gravel as much as pushing off from it, using mostly her toes like she had been taught to in Primary Ed Primary Activities. (A little competition was good for stimulating their brains, even if it was physical testing, the AI activity teacher had said.)  
She made it to the garage door in—she didn’t know how long, but it was _fast,_ and still buzzing with excitement she barged through the open sideboard ‘door’ and then ducked  around in the darkness to avoid the hanging pieces of cloth that had been attached to the ceiling at one point, in an attempt to keep it warm at night, but since then had fallen off. She raced into the diner itself and then all but slammed into the counter.  
Kobra was nowhere in sight. She laughed into her arm, a more muffled sound than it should’ve been since her throat was so dry. She heaved herself onto the counter like an octopus, all limbs squishing to it, and then almost tumbled down into the space behind it. The shelves there were a little dark but she could still tell the shapes of bottles from the shapes of anything else, or the lack of shapes that meant there was only empty shelf. (Most of it was empty.) She grabbed a bottle and then twisted open its top, smelling it quickly before she started drinking. The somewhat stale, all fluoridated smell of sweet stuff drifted out of the bottle, and nothing else; she tipped it back gratefully, shifting around so she was sitting properly on the ground with her back leaning against one of the supports on the inside of the cupboards.

 

Something out in the diner, on her right side, shuffled, but she was too busy enjoying being able to not have a burnt mouth to look over at it. 

The door opened and then shut, both times sounding its unique and kind of weird rattling “dry glass with dust on the hinge and outside an inside” sound that Grace was starting to get so familiar with she would hear it in her sleep soon. She grabbed a second bottle from the shelf, then took a second or two to screw on the one that she had opened for herself before standing up. She grinned as Kobra looked around and then stopped when he caught site of her. “Made it,” she said, then held the bottle out to him.  
  
“Fucking fast, huh,” Kobra said; it wasn’t a bad thing for him to say, ‘cause yeah she totally was. He walked over to the counter and took the bottle of sweet stuff when she passed it over to him. “You make a small barkeep.”  
  
“Good, though. And yeah.” Grace said proudly., She hoisted herself up onto the counter and twisted around until she was sitting opposite him, where he was leaning with one arm on the counter. He drank with his right hand,pretty deep; she guessed he must have been seriously parched, too. “Getting in from that part of the lot is faster if you go through the garage,” she said, “Not by a huge lot but enough that it’s jus faster--”  
  
“Smart,” Kobra said, and he was nodding, smiling a little. “You like math?”

“I can _do_ math,” Grace remembered. Something in the corner shuffled again, and there was a light thump; Grace leaned to the side a little, wondering what the hell was the noise. She couldn’t tell anything just then, so she kept talking—“I think that’s not what you mean, though, I think of numbers and stuff not like, angle--”  
  
  
Behind Kobra, the door to the old bathrooms opened and a Draculoid walked out. The white of its uniform practically burned the eye as it stood against the dust-washed walls; its red mouth in its mask looked even more grotesque than the Skid Mark from the Possums’ wolf mask had been. It locked eyes with Grace—or more likely the screen’s that covered its eyes targeted the coordinates in its field of vision that corresponded with Grace’s actual eyes—and it paused, slowly reaching for its blaster like if it didn’t move fast she wouldn’t see it moving at all. Or maybe it was actually moving super fast, and Grace’s head was just making it slower. Everything seemed to be slowed down.

Grace shouted, and she had no idea what she said. Everything seemed to go back into regular speed all at once.

The Drac’s hand flew to their holster at their sides at the same time that Kobra’s head snapped around towards them and he dropped his water bottle, the precious water skidding and slopping halfway across the bar top. The next instant Kobra had spin on his heel, using the hand that he’d been leaning on the counter with to dive for his gun. The Draculoid had taken a defensive stance against the diner wall; behind it and had gotten off one shot; the shot that would have been landed, except that Grace shoved Kobra aside by knocking into him as she rolled herself as quickly as she could, sideways, right off the bar top. Both of them landed on the ground, swearing loudly, as the laser blast sizzled into the speckle-dot ceiling.

The Drac moved two quick step-s to the side and made to raise it’s blaster again, speed and precision— but Grace was faster.  
By the time that the Dracloid had gotten around the barrier of the counter which had been obstructing both of its targets, Grace just pushed herself up until she was crouched; the second that she could see the white of both of the Drac’s booted feet she launched herself forward, bashing her elbows on the concrete enough to make her yell and her teeth rattle, but also enough that the Draculoid—making  a loud noise that wasn’t classifiable as a scream or a yell, not exactly, too warped and warbly for it—tipped forwards with the force of her landing on it, overbalancing as its legs shifted backwards and it didn’t compensate quickly enough. It landed with enough force to knock out some of its teeth, if Grace could see any of its teeth.

As Grace had dived she’d twisted sideways, still holding onto its legs with difficulty, but enough to avoid getting squashed by the falling body. It yelled again, flailing around its arms as it instinctively curled forward; keeping weight off of its suddenly out of air lungs and scrambling to reach forward to grab her. Grace dropped its legs and then scrambled up again; the Drac fumbled for its blaster, but it had bounced too far away when the Drac had fallen.

Grace grasped blindly for the side of her belt and yanked out her own blaster free as it started to try and roll; she fired twice straight into its head.  
A third bolt of light-blast thudded anti-climatically into the top part of it’s chest as the body fell, once again and still heavily but now with a sound of wet-inside finality that was strange, backwards onto the floor. Grace flinched back from the light, hitting the small of her back behind her on the edge of the booth’s table, and her head jerked up from looking at the corpse she’d just made.

  
Kobra was standing there, his height compared to hers giving him enough of a difference to aim at the Drac’s chest and get the hit. His eyes were wide; his sunglasses had fallen when they’d fell sideways from the bar. They met Grace’s eyes for a second and then skittered away, back onto the dead City police on the floor.  
  
Kobra Kid breathed out all at once, in a measured, long breath that shook his shoulders. “Alright,” he said out loud. “Okay.”  
Grace looked down at the Draculoid that was at her feet again. It didn’t move. The suddenness of its not moving was way more obvious here, with the afternoon light, than it had been before in the rain or the first time inside with the rain pounding against the rof and huge iron doors of the car-chop shop. Something about it shook Grace like her whole spine had been jostled, like she was in a car crash.  
She stepped forward and kicked it, hard, in the chest. Her foot felt the same as it did when it hit anything with some movement inherent to it but didn’t cave in, or anything. The body jostled but didn’t react otherwise.  
“It’s dead,” Kobra said. He’d moved closer again, and Grace’s head spun a little when she tried to step over to him but she didn’t want to sit down where the body was so she just put both of her hands on the side of her head, like she was holding a bell still. Her blaster was still warm and dug into her fingers.  
“Steady,” Kobra said.  
Grace felt his fingers curl around part of her arm, and she jumped a little. She looked over with her eyes wide, and Kobra let go, but not super-fast like he thought she was going to freak out or anything. Grace appreciated that. Grace’s heart, or spine or insides or _whatever,_ it felt a little more settled than it had been just a second ago. She slowly put her arms down. She kept holding onto her blaster because she didn’t know what else to do with it.  
“What do we do?” She asked. Her voice sounded way smaller than it should have been, she was pretty sure.

Kobra put a hand on her shoulder, briefly, and then stepped around her, peering down at the Drac. He used his shoe to shift the arm a little, and then stepped over it to shift the other arm. “Only the one pistol,” he said. “Got a comm system--”  
“It told people we were here?” Grace asked fast, feeling sick.  
“No,” Kobra said, still not looking up. “It wouldn’t have time after it heard us. It would’ve known some runners had been squatting here from all the stuff in the sleepspots, but not who or for how long or when they’d left.” He kneeled down for a second to check something by the head, then stood back up again with a grunt. “The nobodyfaces have known someone’s out here for a real long time, motorbaby, we can’t just up and move every single time Central Command decides to send a terminator sweep out in a spoke from the mid-Zones. There’s too much stuff here for us to move at once. Other people need it, too, not just us. It’s got a well pump and a actual pot to piss in and enough cover to last any rains. It’s a zonerunning place. Fucking _ours,_ ” Kobra kicked the Drac too, then, not super hard but still enough that it lurched grotesquely sideways.  
Grace stumbled backwards with a noise that was embarrassingly close to a squeak. She clapped a hand over her mouth, thinking, _stupid, he’ll think you’re---_  the thought didn’t finish except for a heavy sense of foreboding and worry.  
But Kobra didn’t seem to be thinking any of that. “Sorry,” he said, and out loud. He stepped backwards from the body, then stepped gingerly over it, looking between it and her. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Grace took her hand off from her mouth and nodded.

Kobra breathed in deep again. “The point is—this one’s just a scout. Sniffing stuff out is their designation. What they’re programmed for. It wasn’t looking for anybody special or nothing,” he said. “Nothing it told whoever it was talking too matters. We’re gonna be fine.”  
He was trying to make her feel better, Grace suddenly realized. She swallowed the acidy taste of fear out of her throat and nodded, too fast to really mean anything.

Petra had told her about Extermination sweeps; she’d said that they were super common in-Zone, like shittier rain, and mid-Zone they were common enough you watched your back at all times. Grace had only seen two, which had been enough. Skitter Scratch had died in one of them. But Petra had said the further out you were the less likely the BLI head dead-eyes were to send nobodyfaces’ out after you, and the Fabulous Diner was about as far out as you could go without getting right into the deadlands. “Why’d it come this far?” She asked, trying hard to keep her voice from shaking and not sure how much she’d made it.  
“Don’t know,” Kobra said. “Sometime’s they just do.” He looked over at her, his eyes bright and focused. “We need to check outside,” he said. “For tracks.”  
“Or others,” Grace said, and she really felt like she might be sick then. She put her hands around her stomach, still clutching her blaster in her right one.  
“Yeah,” Kobra said. “There’s not likely, with scouts this far out. BLI conserve resources whenever the fuckers can. It’s okay,” he said then, “You don’t have to come with me--”  
“No,” Grace said suddenly, looking up sharp. She made herself stand up straight. “No, I’m fine. Let’s go.” She didn’t want to be by herself; or by herself with the body.  
  
Maybe Kobra understood that without her having to say it, or maybe he didn’t. Either way when both of them stepped outside—cautiously, blasters drawn—they stepped out together. There wasn’t another nobodyface in sight. The only sign that anyone, at all, had been there except for them was a thinly indented set of bike tracks that Grace spotted. There wasn’t very much of them. They led from the bike (which had been left leaning on the side of the diner looking bizarrely like a cut-out from a book about another world and sparkling slightly) out to the brush grass and scrub bush that dotted and covered the dusty ground to the east of the diner itself, and from there back onto the highway. The only part of the bike’s tire marks that was clearly visible was the tread pressed into the thin sand right between the garage and the scrub.  
“Definitely only a scout, then,” Kobra muttered to himself. He rubbed his hair back from his eyes and then closed them for a second. “Shiny.”  
“It’s still inside,” Grace said. She was glad that there weren’t any others but _why,_ why was Kobra not freaking out more? It was— she’d never had to _be near_ a body before. She’d always just ran from them. Grace pressed her hands to her eyes, shaking a little.

“I know,” Kobra said beside her. She looked over and he was looking over at her, being serious. “We’ll--- listen,” he said, changing tack so fast she could almost see him doing it in the air. “Wait out here,” he said. “Or—no. In the garage, okay? Wait in the garage.” 

“Where are you going,” Grace asked, working hard to keep her voice from shaking or even wobbling up and down. It sounded decent, which she was grateful to herself for.  
  
“Inside,” Kobra said. He’d turned to her and was wringing ( _wringing!_ That’s what it was called) his hands again, quickly enough that Grace wondered if it felt weird or not. “I’m gonna get the radio and transmit over to the guys. Then maybe Tommy, too, or some Plague Rats or—point is, the others’ll come back,” he explained in short bursts. “They’ll—we’ll deal with it, and you don’t have to be in the room. While we move it. Okay?”  
  
Grace glanced to the side, looking up in the air to keep her eyes moving and her head thinking instead of dwelling on anything. She took a deep breath, then looked back at him. “You don’t think I’m stupid?” She asked.  
  
Kobra’s eyebrows went up to his head. “No,” he said. “Anyone freaks out their first up-close fight.”

 _This wasn’t the first one,_ Grace wanted to say, but she’d already been shoving that particular memory as far back in the cobwebs and distractions of her head as she could so like hell was she going to bring it up now. “Can you bring me out my jacket?” She asked, holding onto each of her bare elbows like they’d fall off if she let go. It helped, being able to kind of centre herself over her own two feet, but still felt like she could use the jacket itself for reality-giving right about now.  
“Yeah,” Kobra said. He looked more sympathetic than he had other times, but she couldn’t guess why. Maybe it was because she could actually see more of his face. “Come on, though. That storm’s gonna roll in soon and it won’t be pretty.”  
It had been months and months since Grace had been properly afraid of rain, but when Kobra carefully held the plywood board of the garage’s door open she found herself shaking a little anyway.  
  
She sat on the ramshackle table that someone had dragged in from somewhere and stashed against the back wall of the garage, once she was sure it wouldn’t actually break underneath her.  Kobra left and then came back with her less bright than usual City-given jacket. It looked and smelled like it’d lived its natural life in a bucket of salt and water. She hadn’t noticed how sweaty it’d gotten, and that sweat stained, but then of course it would. It kind of grossed her out. Still, Grace put it on in as much of a hurry as she could with her arms shaking, and then closed her eyes, trying to breathe.  
  
=


	7. Antidotes For What's Ailing You

The other killjoys got there fast; way faster than Grace would have expected, if she had known where they were and had been counting.

Grace looked up from where she’d been sitting on the garage table, her knees bent up in  front of her face, when she heard the rumble and grind of a car’s wheels on the sand. She was about ready to spring up and fight but then a redhead popped out of the gloom, only visible in the reflect-back of the headlights, and she sat down fully again. Nobody but Poison would wear hair like that around this place.  
The Fabulous ones looked up as they hurried out of the Trans Am and through the rusty side door into the diner, but none of them seemed to see her longer than a second. Grace put her feet back up on the table when the door had banged shut behind the last of them, feeling young and small.

  
Eventually, even the fear and sick-feeling gave way to boredom and loneliness. Grace felt like the shadows in the garage were starting to bend towards her.

 

She unfolded her knees and then stood up, going back inside the diner slowly.

There was only Ghoul and Jet in the diner when she peered through the open door. Thankfully that also included the down Draculoid; the diner’s floor was empty where the slash of red and too-bright white had been before. Grace didn’t know how long she’d been sitting in the garage. It didn’t seem like that long. Someone had grabbed Kobra’s dropped water bottle off of the counter bartop. The spilt water itself must’ve evaporated into the porous air.  
Ghoul looked up at her when she came in. He and Jet were sitting at the table that was closest to where the Draculoid had fallen. They were smoking out the corner of their mouths. Both of them seemed a little deflated; less colourful than usual. Maybe it was just the smoke haze. He nodded a little gravely at her. “Hey, honey,” he said.  
_He’s saying it now too,_ Grace thought, but she didn’t say anything like it. Instead, she said, “Where did you put it?”  
“What?” Ghoul caught her glance towards the spot on the floor that was slightly less dusty and more grimy than the rest of it. “Oh. We hauled it up and out, motorgoblin, you don’t need to worry about it.”  
“Oh.” Grace took a second to unstick her throat. She realized, suddenly, that the radio wasn’t on; nobody was tinkering or humming or shouting something, and there wasn’t even any wind outside. Her voice seemed to ring too loud. “Where’s the others?”  
“By the roadbend,” Ghoul told her. “Kobra was having a bit of a word-block so Jewel went out to sit with him. It helps sometimes.”   
Nothing about that made sense. Grace narrowed her eyes. “What?”  
“Sometimes when Kobra gets real shook up he can’t speak,” Jet said. “Jewel talking to him helps. Can help.”  
“Why’re you calling Poison ‘Jewel’?” Poison was the only other killjoy there, she would’ve heard if someone else had pulled up.  
“Usually he’s Poison, but sometimes she has lady days and when she does she’s Jewel,” Jet said. He shrugged, ashing his cigarette. “You just gonna stand there ‘til moonrise?” He asked gently.  
Oh. “… no.” Grace put her hands in her pocket and then walked over to the booth. Both of them moved over for her; she hesitated a split second before climbing in next to Ghoul. He smiled at her sideways, but he still looked a little sad—or tight-eyed, or something. Grace picked at a scrap of scratched-in grime on the tabletop and then asked her fingernails, “Is Kobra not talking my fault?”  
“No,” Jet said, at the same time that Ghoul said, “Negatory, kiddo.”  
Grace looked at Ghoul, so he continued, “Snakeface just needs some time to recharge sometimes. Like a battery filling up. A shoot-out you don’t expect can be a real earthquake sometimes, you know? S’nothing to do with you.”  
Grace isn’t sure that she believes that, but she nods slowly anyway.

The others smoke in silence, and Grace tries not to breathe too much. They don’t look at her when they’re exhaling, obviously, but it still tickles against the back of her throat like the breath of water before it goes down your air pipe and you cough on it. She hadn’t missed being stuck around smokeheads. At the same time the smell makes her remember Murder City in bright colour and nose too, all the faded oranges and browns and greys of it plus that weird ancient floor wax-and-paper-dust that seemed to stick to everything, the mostly-unwashed junk punk’s funk and always a hint of smoke or gasoline. The smoke smelt a little bit like home. She relaxed, around the smell, even though she was trying to casually filter it through the white sleeve of her jacket at the same time.

“The com-contrap was still broadcasting,” Jet said after a little bit of them all three being quiet. He was using the kind of voice that Grace generally knew was used when adults were talking to each other, and not to the kid who was nonetheless sitting right across from them with her legs swinging a little back and forth under the table.  
“Right,” Ghoul replied, talking through the side of his mouth. He took the cigarette (half grey and shrivelled up) out of his mouth and then licked two of his fingers, squashing the lit end to a dry non-glow with a quick snap and _hiss_ of the ember. He put it on the table carefully, like he was measuring it against the span of his hand, and then tapped twice and looked back up at Jet. “Think it was a planting bot?”  
_Plant_ sent cold shoots down Grace’s back. She sat up straighter, like she’d been hit with electric shock, fear making her stomach suddenly sick.  
But neither of the sunshines seemed to be talking about her when they said it. “I think it was just a scout,” Jet replied. “Normal sweep with un-normal ends.”  
“That’s what Kobra said,” Grace said out loud, and both of their heads turned towards her. She wished she’d thought to put her hands back under the table so she could ball them into fists in her pockets without them noticing, but if she did that now it would be weird; and she _wasn’t_ hiding anything. She kept her forearms carefully flat on the greyish blue plastic-top and just folded her palms together, digging the ends of her fingers into them so she didn’t freak out or anything. She shouldn’t be nervous, but she didn’t—she _didn’t like_ two people looking at her at once. “Before you all got here,” she said, “After we’d—he said it was just a normal scout. He said that BLI sends them out here a lot.” She only recognized that she was sounding like she wanted it to be true a second too late, but the, “Right?” slipped out anyway.  
Ghoul pursed his lips and Jet Star frowned, just a little. “He’s not wrong,” Jet said, “But--”  
“They’re not out here lots lots,” Ghoul half cut-off Jet and half confirmed what the other sunshine had been saying. “And usually if there’s a two-way transmitter on them we get them checked out anyway. Especially if…” He went quiet for a second, then looked from her to the floor past her.  
“Just tell me,” Grace said, suddenly so _incredibly_ tired of people keeping all whispers and secrets about stuff that would affect her whole life. She was shaking a little.  
“Scouts send reports back where they came from. The last thing it sent was a ID code,” Ghoul said. “Kobra checked the buttons, there’s a call-up you can see--- but it wasn’t any of ours. So it must’ve been you. Devil’s got your number now.”  
Grace paused, then nodded, looking up.

They looked back at her, grave, but then raised their eyebrows. “… don’t worry too hard, motorbaby,” Ghoul said.  
Grace opened her mouth, and then shrugged. “They already know who I am,” she said. “I’ve been gone a long time. It doesn’t matter anymore.” She glanced up at them when they were silent, and then looked back at her hands. Runners didn’t say sorry. “… didn’t mean for them to get you into—into problems,” she said instead.  
Ghoul blinked for another second, and then laughed that weird giggly laugh, leaning back against the seat. It was a little more strained then it had been in the car the other day, or whenever it’d been, but still a good sound. “Shiny,” he said, wiping his hair back from his face still looking at the ceiling. “Shiny as hell.”  
Grace’s shoulder relaxed a little. “Should I be--”   
“No, no, motorgoblin. They’re on our tails like every goddamn day since our tender boots hit the dirt, it doesn’t matter if we’ve got another ID on their dish list. If it doesn’t bother you then fuckin’ shiny.”  
“Oh,” Grace said. “Good.” She looked back at the table, feeling a little better.

Ghoul shook his head fondly, reaching over like he was going to pat her shoulder, then seemed to reconsider. He sat forward, again, the humour slipping off his face a little. He looked back over at Jet. “Cop out or not, we should get the doctor in on it,” he said. “Just for sweeps.”  
Jet Star put out his own cigarette, laid it on the table, scratched his shoulder and then nodded. “And we get him to check up on the little one,” he said.  
“You mean me?” Grace asked pointedly.  
Jet’s faced screwed up a little, looking embarrassed. “Yeah, motorbaby. You.”  
“I’m not sick,” she said.  
“Anymore,” Ghoul added pointedly.  
“He’s not that kind of doctor, not a medjoy exactly--” Jet started, and then the door squeaked open behind all of them.  
Jet Star turned from his seat towards the noise and both Ghoul and Grace both unconsciously reach for their guns, but it’s only Kobra and-- and Jewel, Grace remembered, walking back in looking a little off-put but not too worse for wear.  
“Back yet?” Ghoul asked, and he nodded at Kobra.  
Kobra just shrugged and then made an “OK” gesture with his hand, fingers bent together. His other hand he’d put the power glove on and it looked half-disassembled. Kobra liked to pick at things when he was nervous. Sorrow twinged inside Grace’s head, like a nerve.  
“Alright,” Ghoul said easily. He looked towards Jewel then. “Motorkid doesn’t have a problem with her ID being all over the AM,” he said, “So no alert level-changes there.”  
“It’s a problem!” Grace protested, then shrunk a little when all of them looked at her again. She held onto the table as she continued, pushing herself to finish, “’s just not a, a crying problem or whatever. They already... They already knew who I am.”  
“So you’ve shared,” Jet said affirmatively.  
“But it’s not a flaredown issue,” Ghoul finalized.  
Jewel’s eyes had been hopping between the three of them and then finally nodded. She smiled a little, one corner of her mouth. “Okay,” she said. “That’s milkshake, at least. The other items?”  
“We should visit Death-Defying,” Jet said.  
“And keep up the peri-sweeps, maybe farther,” Ghoul said. “Watch the grasses and dust-ups on the roads.”  
Jewel nodded. “Any blocks before then?”  
“Negatory.”  
“Alright, well, let’s load them up then. We got the package in the wheel-hammock, might as well get going here.” Jewel scratched underneath her red hair and then carded her fingers through it, sweeping it out of her face. She looked behind her at Kobra, making a couple of signs with her hands.  
Kobra just nodded, clasping her hand to bend his fingers between hers and squeezing once before letting go.  
Jewel turned back to them. “There’s not more time then we’re gonna get today, at least yet this week,” she said.  
“Well alright,” Ghoul said, and he turned to nudge Grace but she’d already scrambled out of the booth and onto her feet.

He nodded at her as he got himself out of the booth, doing the usual killjoy patdown: head, boots, holster. “Onto the fucking road again.”  
“I’ll radio ahead,” Jet said, stretching his arms when he got up and then dropping them loosely. “Tell them we’re all on our way.”

  
*  
  
In the car it was hot, the outside of the metal radiating wavy lines up into the desert sky. Grace didn’t purposefully keep all her arms and legs in her own square of space this time, and she felt relaxed a little more than she had before because of it. The music that warbled gently out of the car speakers helped. It was a big difference between the usual pump-volume-until-ears-break way of doing things. She wondered who was pumping the sounds from the other side of the speakers. She was pretty sure that Doctor Death-Defying wouldn't play this.

The radio pirate, sound-doctor’s voice had drifted through her head pretty much ever since she’d gotten in the car, winding along the roads in her brain to try and find one that matched itself. Something about it was familiar, she was sure. But familiar in a specific kind of way; she’d heard the radio DJ sometime before and it had meant something. More than just the usual passing niceness of a song.

They drove for a long time, through some hills and scraps of desert into a deep valley that might have had plants and rivers in it once. The sheer sides of the valley that surrounded them and the sight of all of the dried-up riverbeds made Grace feel both trapped and scared. Jewel, who was driving, didn’t seem to give too many fucks about it. Jewel—Poison-- never seemed to be scared of anything. Grace was kind of in awe about it. She was also busy hiding her eyes in Fun Ghoul’s (surprisingly not-moving) shoulder to say anything.  
She meant to lean back as soon as the nonsense-squeaking voice of fear in the back of her head stop screeching its awful noise. She didn’t want anyone in the Am to think she got scared for no reason.

 

It turned out that Grace was more tired than she had given herself credit for, though.  
She went to sleep in the canyon and then, when she woke up, they were cresting actual hills again, the Am’s engine mumbling to itself under the hood as Jewel steadily switched gears. The sun had rolled to a lower spot in the wide sky. It wasn’t any less blinding. Some clouds drifting made it green-shift where it shone down on them.  
Her nose had ran a little bit on Ghoul’s sleeve. _Gross._ She sat up, trying to wipe her hand on her sleeve without making it obvious that that was what she was doing.  
Mission failed. Ghoul looked up when she shifted and grinned at her, a ‘I see what you did there’ grin. Above that, though, his eyes had gotten the same sort of warm-soft that… that Skitter had used to.  
Grace blinked with her hands up to her nose still, processing that. She’d forgotten the exact look that Skitter Scratch had had on her face while the junk punk had looked at her and Hope, but there it was, held in Fun Ghoul’s eyes and eyebrows like someone had painted her face over his on some glass. Grace had no idea what that could _mean,_ exactly. Whatever it was, they had it the same.   
Taking one last sniff to clear any excess bats out of her nose-cave, Grace put down her arm and smiled back. It seemed the thing to do.

Then she looked forward, clearing her throat with a weird _ticktictic_ as she swallowed. She asked, “How much longer?”   
“The roost the Doctor’s at right now is over in Zone Two, honey,” Jewel spoke up. “We’ll be riding for a little while yet.”  
“Oh.” The phrase _zone two_ buzzed in her brain like a persistent fly on a window in her head. Grace couldn’t do much more than let it buzz, though. She just nodded, and then closed her eyes again.  
In the background she heard someone scoffing but she was already almost out.

  
  
When she woke up a second time the car was jostling and slowing. Without even opening her eyes one of her hands flew to her belt, clutching the hilt of her blaster.  
“Woah, woah, hold up,” Ghoul’s sounded beside, raspy from sleep.  
She opened her eyes to see everyone still in the car, none of them looking alert like they would if there was a fight. She relaxed her hold on her blaster.  
“We’re here, sunshines—and resident shortshot,” Kobra said from the front, glancing over his shoulder.  
“Shortshot nothing, you’ve trained an early starter here,” Ghoul laughed. When Grace had started sleeping there’d been sunset spilling through his hair and around his shoulders, but a darkness had hit the outside in the meantime. Was it night?  
Grace put her hands back on her knees again. (She was sitting criss-crossed, with both of her ankles folded under each other on the seat.) Curious where they were, she dug her elbows into the felt of the seat back and hoisted herself up another inch or so, straining to see above the dashboard.

Oh.  
The surroundings around them were familiar. All of a sudden, the reason why the Doctor Death-Defying’s voice had been so familiar too flooded back behind her eyes.  
She dropped back onto the seat. Her heart was doing something fluttery and weird that her stomach was copycatting.  
  
“Rolling up,” Kobra announced from her front right side. There was the usual getting-ready flurry of movement. Grace unfolded her legs, feeling empty-handed without her bag with her. She couldn’t remember why she’d left it at the diner.

“Hey, roll-ups waiting,” Ghoul said, half-idly. He was leaning into Grace’s seat’s space while he fumbled his blaster into his holster again, peering out the middle of the windshield. 

Grace had glimpsed the polka-dotted shirt and long dark hair of Show Pony, too, when she’d looked. She cleared her throat, pressing some nervous down at the same time. “Can you let me out first?” She said, out to the car in general.

Jet Star answered. “You feeling roadsick?” He asked, concern on his face again.

No, she wasn’t, but it was as good an answer as any. She nodded.

“If you hold onto the side of the door here,” Jet tapped the part of the car and roof that his side’s door shared with Kobra’s in the front, “You can get out fast. I’ll get it open for you, if ‘s cool.”

Grace nodded at him, trying to look both thankful and a little carsick.

She didn’t know why she felt like she had to talk to Pony alone—everything that the killjoys heard about her they knew from Sid, or would know pretty fast from Doctor Death-Defying—but she still felt it.

A moment later the car was stopped completely. Fast-precise as she could, Grace climbed over Jet Star and through the open door, using the frame as a handhold, and then tumbled out onto the sand. She landed on her feet and then quickly shut the door behind her, glancing quickly to make sure she didn’t hit anyone’s raised eyebrows or fingers.

It wasn’t night; just stormy. When she stood she had to brace herself against the wind, which she hadn’t been expecting. It stirred the sand around her feet and the Am’s wheels in a slow susurrus, all moving north. She stared at it for a few seconds.

Then she looked up and at Show Pony. She’d last seen them outside Glimmer, when she’d been full of fresh hurt by leaving Hope behind and more than half out of her head. It was super weird to see them now.

 

Pony looked back at her, and then blinked. “You,” they said, sounding surprised.  
Grace nodded. She hadn’t been expecting to see them, either.

She remembered something about stories, and threes. If Hope was here she would remember.

All of a sudden Grace’s eyes stung. She wanted—she wanted to ask Pony about Hope. She thought. But maybe Pony wouldn’t remember anything. The thought made her legs go watery. But Show had been the first person to be nice to her and Hope when they had been alone. Both her and Hope might have literally died, if not for meeting them. Grace felt a rush of affection for the tall killjoy standing in front of her. All at once, her mush-legs and her stinging eyes and her heart swelling. It felt like dying.

Pony smiled, leaning over a little so they and her met sightline to eye.  “So _you’re_ the honey-child Jet went on about,” they said. “I was wondering. How've you been, motorbaby?”

Grace didn’t have the words to describe how she’d been since Pony had seen her last. She just shrugged. She stepped closer to them—then stopped herself. She was being rude; you didn’t just hug somebody you didn’t really know. More than rude, in the zones that was straight-up dangerous. Even if you’d been talking for a little while. “They didn’t tell me we were coming to see you,” she said finally, a little bit to stall for time.

“Well, maybe the crew didn't know you knew me. What _did_ they say?”

They said somebody was going to check her over, but not in a med way, whatever that meant. Suddenly not knowing what to do with her hands, she stuck them in her pockets. “The doctor.”

Pony nodded. “That would be my friend,” they said. “I think I told you about him--”  
“I remember.” The very first time that Grace had ever met the starshine, they were offering her help and safe passaging. She hadn’t believed them, of course—she’d been really mean, actually. She hadn’t believed them when they said there was somewhere safe to go, that Pony could take the girls there themself. Grace had thought that was the worst lie she’d ever head.

Hope, though. She had liked Show Pony right away. She’d always had been better at people than Grace was.

Grace tried to wipe her hair away to hide her eyes, which were starting to get filled up, but she didn’t even really have to try—the wind was wickeder than wicked that day, tossing her curls all over the place and hiding most of her face from sight.

“Well,” Pony said. “I'm sure he'll be thrilled to meet you.  Mini-my’s are always welcome in our place.”

“I remember,” Grace blurted. Hope had asked her again and again after going to Show Pony’s shelter, and a couple of times Grace had assured her she would. Hope had been so happy when Grace had finally agreed to it; Grace’s mouth crinkled a little thinking of it now.

 

Without thinking, her stomach and her heart lurched at the same time and her feet lurched with them.  
A half-second later she shouldn’t’ve done that. She felt Pony tense up under her hug and almost immediately went back on her heels to avoid and apologize, under Zone manners—

but then Pony dropped their shoulders and hugged her back.  
Grace shook her eyes and shook a little, relaxing into the hug. They kind of stunk and kind of smelled like burnt flowers, like chemicals someone made to smell like burnt flowers. They hugged like they knew it’d help. Grace felt her eyes overflowing, and she didn’t care anymore.

 

Behind the two of them, Grace heard one of the Am’s doors scraping open.

She didn’t want to have to explain herself to the killjoys. She quickly disengaged from Pony, offered them a quick smile just in case the upset parts of her face could be hidden if she did.

Then she caught sight of the building behind them properly for the first time since she’d tumbled out of the car itself. Her breath caught somewhere under her lungs. She was pulled to it like a magnet to metal.

“You know her?” Jewel said a yard or so behind her, but she wasn’t talking to Grace, so the ten-year-old kept walking.

 

She didn’t even make a sharp shadow on the wall because of the clouds in the sky. The building itself was the same brick and concrete, mostly-nondescript beige that a lot of desert places were. It looked like it might have originally been beige, anyway, on the spots on the corners and very top of the roof-side where it was hard to get paint to stick. The door still had no handle. All of the graffiti she remembered from the first time she’d seen it was still there, in all its shades and hues. There was _more._ WKIL featured up near the room in prominent letters, like it had before, except it looked fresh; it was about the only word that was clear on the whole wall. Grace had gotten a lot better at reading mixed-up messages but it was almost a solid wall of looping colour, now, and her little sister’s name—the word that her little sister had been named after—was buried underneath all of it. Her heart sank a little, letting go of an idea she hadn’t even known she was holding onto.

Grace touched the wall with the palm of her hand, like she could physically feel it there somewhere, like a heartbeat. She kept trying to read what she wanted from it. Eventually her eyes blurred from the swirl of all the letters. She looked down at her feet, blinking a lot and then just squeezing her tired eyes closed. The tears dripped anyway.  
She walked along the building with her hand on the warm brick, kicked viciously at a scrap of rock that was on the ground, and then sat down with her back against. She pulled her knees up to her chest so she could rest her forehead on them and then, as an afterthought, brought up her arms to block out the rest of the light.  
She could hear Show Pony and the Fabulous crew talking over by the car, sometimes specific words but mostly just a buzz. All of them were almost definitely talking about her but Grace couldn’t bring herself to care too much. Her full eyes dripped out and started gathering on the knee of her jeans. She tried to wipe her face again, feeling sand and grime stick to both her cheek and her hand.

  
Suddenly, a loud _crack_ of electricity made Grace jump where she was sitting. Instinctively she craned her head; there were clouds gathering fast up in the sky just above the building and the Am, some of them just on the dangerous side of green.

Grace put her head back on her knees. She knew that she should get right gone with clouds like those overhead, but she couldn’t bring herself to move. She… her heart hurt.

A couple moments later there was a creak and then a slam, reverbing through the bricks Grace’s spine was leaned onto. One of the killjoys—or possibly all of them—had opened the door to the shack and then let it slam shut. Grace remembered how she hadn’t even noticed the door first. It’d been so perfectly the same colour as the rest of wall it was like it hadn’t been there.

She heard, a second later, the telltale _fffffs fffffs_ of roller blades trying to roll across lumpy sand with hardpack underneath it. Grace squeezed her eyes shut a couple more times, trying to breath slowly and evenly even though she kept hiccupping or having to physically swipe at her eyes with her sleeves.

“Hey,” Show Pony’s voice said, slightly away from her. There was a pause, and then two sharp but quiet mini-cracks that Grace winced at sympathetically. “Hey-you.”

Grace looked up. She didn’t see a point in pretending she couldn’t hear. She was pretty sure her tears still had sand tracks stuck to them, but maybe they didn’t. She couldn’t see them anyway.

Pony’s face twisted upsetly, but they didn’t say a thing about it. Instead, they say, “We gotta go inside, okay?” They point to the sky and added, “The others've scarpered already. It’s going to rain soon.”

 _I know, it’s just my heart hurts,_ Grace tried to say, but what comes out instead is, “I miss her.” And that’s still true. She moved her eyes off of Pony’s and tugged her knees closer to her again, embarrassed.

“Oh, sugarhead.” Pony held up a slow hand and then put it on her shoulder, gently. “I’m sorry.”

Grace tensed up at the name, and then a microsecond more at someone’s hand getting closer to her face, and then she didn’t care anymore. It was just Pony. She put her forehead back on the topsides of her knees, willing her tears to stay put wherever they belonged inside her head.

Thunder cracked again, and this time a bunch of smaller _booms_ followed it, shaking the bricks against Grace’s back. She felt the wind pick up again, stirring hot air against the curls on the back of her warm neck. _Crap,_ she thought. She looked up and then shook off Pony’s hand, which was still on her shoulder. She scrambled onto her feet again, then waited, looking away quick to wipe her face with her sleeve. The two of them had to get inside or they’d get caught in sizzling rain.

Pony of course lifted their hand off of her shoulder once they realized what Grace was doing, and when Grace looked back from wiping her face they were on their feet too already. They’d gotten up in seconds, graceful as hell even with six wheels strapped to the ends of their boots, and Grace felt a  spike jealous in her chest. 

There was no time to say anything, and she wouldn’t’ve if there even was time, obviously. Both of them hurried to the door of the building with its near-perfect camoflauge. Pony opened it using a piece of slim metal for leverage. Both of them managed to get inside before the acid poured.

Right inside the building it was just as small as it was on the outside, and now darker and a lot more full of _stuff._ The doorway itself was only about big enough for one person to stand in facing the door, so Pony stood sideways. Grace mirrored them, watching curiously as they kicked another piece of scrapmetal, that had been holding the door open by sitting at the threshold and blocking it from hitting the wall completely, out of place and waited as the door slammed shut. Then they started pulling bolt-locks closed on the door from the frame on the wall, which she hadn’t even noticed. She guessed maybe that was the security, and they did that all the time when somebody was in the building.

Grace turned around and looked into the room again. It was still stuffy and dark, but now that her eyes had adjusted she could see a bit more. There was no real carpet or pattern or anything, only a bare concrete floor with orange dust weaving over it. The left wall must have been an outside one because it went all the way to the other side of the room and met in another corner, which wasn’t very far. Someone had nailed a campfire-lamp light into the middle of it, about halfway up. The wall to her left would’ve ended immediately, except that old-looking tech stuff was piled twice and a half as high as Grace was tall, which made another corner an made the entrance-way an extra foot longer. She couldn’t see her killjoys or the mysterious-non-mystery Doctor Death-Defying around the tech tower, but she could hear their voices pretty clear.

Grace swallowed nervously, then turned towards Pony. They were still fussing with the locks, but they looked over at her when she cleared her throat. She said, “There was a song. A long—I don’t know when again, but it was from here. Or, him, anyway. It was his voice after it.” That was what she had remembered, in the car, the where and when and name. She shoved her hands into her pockets nervously, clenching them so she could focus her head.

“Well yeah, motorbaby, we’ve got piles and piles of songs,” Pony replied. They paused like they had noticed something, then looked over their shoulder quickly and looked back at her. They turned their voice down to match hers. “What of it?”  
Grace hoped they wasn’t making fun of her. It didn’t seem like it. She took a deep breath: “If—if I ask him, will he play it for me again?” Cold clenched around her heart before she’d even fully finished the question, non-specific and intense. What if the death-defying killjoy said no?

Pony, meanwhile, looked at her for a second and a half and then smiled. A soft, and… proud kind of smile, specifically. Strange. “All we can do is ask, sugarhead,” they said.

That was probably right. Grace nodded, then straightened her shoulders. She wasn’t a little kid; she wouldn’t look afraid. She pulled a hand over her hair and flipped it, not sure why she was doing it, but sure she liked the way it feel sort of... like flipping off people, and also how it helped some of the mugginess in the air. “Let’s go, then,” she said, being brave.

From around the corner, a voice answered her that maybe made her jump a little. “Hey, can you do? Fabulous roadgoblin,” Death-Defying said, sounding as syrupy-toned as ever. Also a bit like he was laughing at them, standing there in the doorway. “I’ve just been told all about you.”

Grace chanced a look up at Pony. They was smiling. Reasonably sure, then, that she wasn’t going to be walking right into a trap, Grace stepped forward and around the towering tower of tech stuff, until she was actually in the small room.

 

The first thing she noticed were the Fabulous killjoys, casual and standing in their usual order in a loose semi-circle around the room. The second thing she noticed was the desk in the almost-corner, wood or something like that looked like wood in the weird inside light, with its two turntables and its ‘ON AIR’ halogen light. Its red and the campfire-lamp light’s blueish white from the wall were the only two sources of light in the room.

 

The third thing she noticed was all of the _stuff_ in the room _._ It was the most objects she’d seen in one place since the dump. Pieces of Mousekat dolls and lamps and empty Power Pup cans and plastic glasses were strewn across the desk, in the parts of it that weren’t filled up by the mic and the transmitter and the music player-box and all the wires coming out from them. There were a pair of clunky headphones and a few glowing screens showing the outside of the building set behind the player and mic. (Grace hadn’t noticed any cameras when she’d been out there, but then she hadn’t been looking for them.)

Against the side of the desk there was a box-box that was filled with thin round things bigger than Grace’s face. More boxes are stacked against the walls of the shack, some of them looking breakable or full fit to burst. Magazines in piles paper the floor everywhere she looked, even though they’re the kind that she didn’t look too long at.  
On the walls themselves there was a whole other explosion of colour. Part of it was what looked like a spray-painting of a face right on the wall itself. It filled up a lot of space. Then there were a whole bunch of stuff attached to them, especially on the wall over the desk, which Grace can see the best because of the light there. Someone’s tacked up posters and flags and maps and stickers for bands that Grace recognized some of but not others, and a metal sign saying ‘Route Guano’ that looked like someone stole it right off the road. There was also a bunch of photographs. Most of them seemed to be of places that Grace had never seen. Wide expanses of water, green ground. There were some of regular places too, like dried forests, and copses of Joshua trees. Portraits of Zone runners filled up a whole corner. Show Pony was there the most. Not all of the pictures were ones that the junk punks would’ve called “youngling-friendly”; they’re like the magazines on the floor. One picture was of Show in their road-rolling outfit spread out dramatically against one of the machines that people get guns from, arching their back. Another picture was of someone’s flat naked chest; their head was cropped out, and they had a little red heart drawn on it right above where the person’s actual heart would be. There’s a couple of other pictures of people with boobs without shirts on, and some of people with no clothing at all. Grace stared at those for a couple of seconds and then looked away, feeling weird for having stared.

 

The fourth thing she noticed—finally--was the person who she’d and all of them had technically came here to see. He met her gaze when she’d looked away from the naked pictures. He was sitting in a rolling-chair so she hadn’t seen him at first, looking right over him when her eyes had all over the walls and the desk. (She hadn’t been expecting someone her height in the room.)  
She blushed a little in embarrassment for missing a whole other person, upnodding a little stiffly like she usually did when meeting a desert-someone who was new.  
Doctor Death-Defying looked both older and not-older than she’d expected, somehow. He had long lanky black hair and skin that looked more sun-warm than brown, but that might’ve just been the light. His beard was black too; it only ran on the very bottom of his face, not covering his cheeks like Grace had seen some other runner’s beards to do. Right under his mouth and nose it met up with his moustache, like someone had drawn a frown-face with dark marker right in the middle of his actual face. All his feathering was black (bandana holding back his hair, and the leathery jacket, and the boots he had on), except for blue jeans, and his shirt which was the same kind of green that Ghoul’s vest was. Also, on one of his legs there was a hot-pink contraption that went from up by his hip to just below his knee. It looked like the drawings of an inside of a robot, or a splint with the middle part all cut out. In the whiteish blue light it sparkled when he shifted in his chair, like metal.

Grace couldn’t tell the colours of his eyes as he looked at her, but she could tell the wrinkles and rivets that criss-crossed their corners like rivers. He smiled, and the network changed. “What’re you called, then, roadling?”  He asked easily, like he was introduced to dusty kids with hard chins and crymarks on their faces every day. He had the same voice in front of her as he did on the radio: gravelly, and syrupy at the same time. He sounded like he had a lot of smokes and a lot to say.

Maybe he did meet kids like her every day, Grace thought. She had no idea how this part of the Zones ran, youngling-wise. And she still had no answer for that question. She just shrugged, putting her hands in the pocket of her jacket again. “Don’t have one,” she said.

Doctor Death-Defying’s eyebrows were as black as the rest of his hair, and they went up a couple fractions. “Really,” he said. He rubbed one hand along his beard, thoughtfully. “What’d’you get called around the building if you’re out in the sands, then?”

“’Hey you,’ mostly,” Grace replied.

On her left, she heard Ghoul snicker. She glanced over at him; he and Jet Star were watching the discussion, Kobra was fiddling with his glove, and Poison—Jewel, that was, she was standing with one leg bent underneath her like her feet hurt, one of her hands up to her mouth where she was chewing off the end of her fingernails.

“Well then. It’s milkshake to meet you, hey you,” Death-Defying said. “I’m Doctor D, or Doctor Death-Defying, or Doctor D if you’re short on time. Or if I need rhymes,” he said, rhyming himself to himself.

Grace cracked a bit of a smile at the rhyme. She could feel it physically crack the dust-tracks on her face.

“Right on,” Death-Defying said approvingly, motioning to her with his other hand. “Keeping up a good face in the face of anything else.”

 

Then he looked sideways at the killjoys, and then back at her. He leaned his elbow on the desk beside him and kept his other hand on his face. “Look, motorbaby,” he said, “I’m real sorry to be abrupt about this—but the crew over there told me they brought you over here with a problem.”

Grace narrowed her eyes, confused. “You—mean the Drac? It’s dead.”  
“He means your name, motorbaby,” Kobra spoke up. He had his sunglasses on again and he was looking at Grace, which was nice at least. The others had seemed to uncomfortably turned away—or maybe they were just thinking that it’d be better for her to have privacy.

Still, Grace stiffened a little. Her name was—well, _hers._ She… Hope had been the last one to know it before, she wanted to keep it between them. Everyone else who knew her name was dead. It’d be like walking over a grave to bring it up now. “Why’s it matter my name?”

“That’s a good question,” Death-Defying said. He seemed to genuinely mean it. “It’s ‘cause the Drac you and Kobra Kid dropped—from what I’ve heard—was radioing in certain details of your domain, and it found a number of yours.”

“Ghoul said that didn’t matter,” Grace blurted. She felt like a little kid repeating herself. She didn’t really know why her first instinct was to avoid talking about anything but she was doing it anyway. Her heart was beating too fast to be normal. _They really do think I’m a plant,_ she thought. But that didn’t make any sense. Kobra wouldn’t’ve laughed with (and kind of _at,_ but mostly _with_ ) her like he had if he thought she was spying on them. Ghoul wouldn’t’ve reassured her. Maybe it was Poison, then? Maybe Jewel had made a decision that’d took them all here. That wasn’t Grace’s fault. Poison never spoke to her, not really. Had she said something to make it seem like a plant?

“Slow your pulseline, sugarhead, you’re not in the fire,” Pony said from behind her. Their hand settled on her shoulder again.

It was then Grace realized how tense her shoulders had gotten. She really was acting too kidly: she wanted to be calm and word-sharp. She took a breath in through her nose and out through her mouth.

Death-Defying was watching her closely. While she tried to calm herself down, he’d nodded slowly and surely at her, his hand back on his beard again. “I can’t speak to Fun Ghoul’s words,” he said. “But here-this station--we’re not trying to make sure you are who you say you are. Part on account of how you haven’t said who you are at all. Partly ‘cause I’ve got some inkling.” He nodded towards Show Pony. “Ladyboy here said to me a long while ago you swept past them when you were almost green as turf grass. I believe them. Trouble is, kidcat, that trouble makes do. No matter how long you’re gone, if you’ve got someone still in the city then the deadeyes are gonna come looking for you especially.” His voice turned grave. “That’s not something that we sandrustles can really stand for. Not without any notice first.”

“We’re not chucking you out into the sun,” Ghoul said, then coughed. “Just, like.”  
Jet finished for him, “Taking precautions.”

 _I don’t have anybody left in the city,_ Grace thought, and her throat closed up while her eyes stung. She was _angry_ about it this time. _I don’t have anybody anywhere._

 

Then why not just tell them?

Everyone who cared about her old—her _real_ name were dead. What was it for anymore? All the stalling and jumping and waiting, what use was it.

 

All of the fight just dropped out of Grace at the same time. She felt her heart shake a little inside her ribcage. She was grateful that, at least, she didn’t seem to be showing any sign on her face or in her shoulders, since neither of the killjoys looking at her seemed to react to her at all.

It still felt weirdly private. She didn’t want to say it out loud; her name might break, like glass, if she held it out to the air like that. “You can read, right?” She asked, then realized it sounded rude. “Like you haven’t forgotten or anything?”

Ghoul laughed a little, over by the wall.

“Affirmative,” Death-Defying said. He had a bit of smile on.  
“I’ll write it down,” she said.

Death-Defying nodded slowly, then gestured to Pony. They stepped carefully around Grace and went to a box on the wall, pulled out a piece of charcoal and what looked like the back of a Battery City cereal box that was tore at one corner. They passed it over to Grace.

 

Feeling weird and a little self-conscious, she wrote it down. Her last names felt strange under her hand.

Handing it over felt like a education contract, the things she had written every start of year with her teachers in Primary Ed where she promised to take her medications and work hard and they promised to teach her all they could. Grace wondered, fleetingly, if and what she was going to learn out here. If she hadn’t already.

 

Death-Defying took the piece of cardboard and read it, and then nodded. “Noted, roadgoblin,” he said a little bit more quietly than he had been talking before, like he was more serious. Then he leaned backwards and put the paper with her name—now out of her hands, and it was strange—under one of the piles of compact discs on the desk beside him, by the wall.

Just like that it was done. Grace was standing there, now empty-handed. Feeling off-balanced she put her hands in her pockets, and then one on her gun by her hip. That felt a little closer to center. But she had nothing to _do_ now _._

Panic slid like rainwater down her back. Do they leave? Were the killjoys going to send her back?

“Milkshake,” Show Pony said like they were clearing their throat. “D?  I believe the littleling had a yearn for a song?”

 

*

  
WKIL’s brick-and-wet-dust station in Zone Two had an electrical generator and “imperial fucktons of chords”, which was what made the outgoing airwaves sing and the lights in the walls buzz. The station also had something that wasn’t too seen out in the California wastes, which was a crawlspace under some pieces of the regular flooring. It was floored with concrete made soft by years and years of dust and accumulated dirt. The dust insultated the sound, too. The crawlspace wasn’t very tall at all, maybe a foot high at most and only really good for getting around if you crawled or lied down.  
Show Pony showed Grace how they had set up the inner-innernet connection there, with a flat white plastic square about the size of a hubcap (obviously deadeye tech) and a monitor that looked half-broke with dust holding it together (probably scavenged stuff), and shittons of chords. Some of the wires were exposed and frayed; some were covered with rubbery stuff. The BLIND-square whirred and glowed. The monitor glowed too, spreading light like water flooding over thirsty desert during a storm around the crawlspace-turned-office. The screen was full of transmissions and what looked like code that Grace didn’t understand.

Grace didn’t need to understand it, though; all she needed to do was curl up as much as she could in the narrow space and watch the code spin under the ladyboy’s hands.  
When Show Pony had pointed out a reason for her to be in the shack, Grace had momentarily forgotten her panic. Distracted, she had told the radio pirate (and assembled killjoys, who’d been quiet but present on the wall) what she remembered of the song that’d struck such bells in her heart: _Gloria,_ over and over.  
Death-Defying had nodded in an approving sort of way. “An Armstrong fan,” Death-Defying had said in an approving sort of voice. “Fine choice.”

 

It turned out that the song she’d heard was from a century breakdown of an album, played by sunshines full of green days. Or that was what Death-Defying had said. After that he’d nodded at Show Pony, who’d stepped tight behind Death-Defying’s chair and had reached up to a box that looked half-wrecked. The thing they had pulled out of it was circle-shaped, smooth and grey with buttons indenting one side like windows in a car, and Grace had never seen one outside a wide-runner fair before.  
“It’s a jam-walker,” Show Pony had explained. They had draped themself over the back of Death-Defying’s chair, careful to avoid. A bunch of their hair draped close to the radio-pirate’s face, but his expression didn’t change to show he noticed.

“Thanks, I know what it is,” Grace said, holding her hand out for it. She didn’t mean it to be rude but she didn’t think the two runners would’ve cared. They handed it to her, and it was as smooth as it looked. Grace pushed the round button and the top clicked open. The surface inside shined. She smiled at it, just seeing it. “It’s like the moon,” she said, looking up at Show Pony quickly. She felt a little better with something other than her lack of name in her hands.  
They nodded, and then had given her a sound-circle (CD, Kobra Kid had said they were called from where he and the others were still leaning against the wall), and a pair of soundspillers spraypainted blue.  
“Those’ll give you the sound back,” Death-Defying said, tapping their sides with his finger before handing them over. 

They were huge. Big half-moon of plastic with a round phones at each end of the curved, but she tried them on, and they fit over her ears just fine.

Something on Death-Defying’s workstation beeped. He’d looked around, his eyebrows going up in surprise, before he seemed to notice the clock on the desk and the time it displayed. “Huh. Airwaves open again. It’s amazing how time flies when you’re meeting new people, ain’t it?” He turned quickly back to his desk, flipped on the mics and boxes on the desk, and talked into the mic with a rattle in his voice like reverb: “Music to your nervous system, antidotes to what ails ya. _WKIL_. We’ll be back after these messages.” He flipped a different switch, and then leaned back, looking over at the Fabulous crew with his eyebrow raised. “Have y’all got some business with me, too, or are you gonna sit like salamanders over there?”

Jewel cleared her throat and stepped off the wall.

 

 

Before she started talking, though, Grace had felt a nudge on her own shoulder. Looking over and up at Show Pony, she watched as they had knocked their head to the side to suggest she follow them under the floor.  

 

The alarm squalls in her head that usually went off to indicate danger had been silent; Show Pony was as close to a friend as any she had outside of Zone Three, and besides, they’d have as little room to move as she did if something went sideways. So she’d followed them down. She still kept a hand on her blaster, just in case, and took a second to wish she had had her knife.  
Show Pony didn’t seem to notice her precautions, or maybe they were ignoring her slightly tensed shoulders because they didn’t want to seem threatening. They wriggled on the floor and seemed to be feeling their way forwards. It was really dark down here.

Grace had laughed a little despite herself, seeing Show Pony’s wiggly polka-dot-covered butt as a blue and white shadow in the gloom. She remembered Pony’s dramatic roller-twirls in the road, a long time ago.  Grace followed them by doing what Petra had called a “lowball crawl”, arm over arm with her knees on the concrete, carefully holding to the jamwalker in her right hand and watching where she put her wrist so it didn’t bump against the ground.

Above the two of them, through the concrete floor of the makeshift station, the echoes of the killjoy’s voices and footsteps sounded muffled. They were talking trade or something; more likely, they were talking Grace. She could make out certain words if she tried hard enough. She wouldn’t be trying very much. There was a certain point when adults wouldn’t talk to kids like her anymore, only between each other, and the group had reached that point.

 

Under the floor, Green Day pumped in through the soundspillers into Grace’s ribcage and lungs.

At first she was confused; the songs sounding like a radio even on the disc, all static-noise and squeaks. But then she heard a small voice getting through all the static, and she held still trying to listen to it.

It was a man's voice, higher than her dad's had been, but smooth and sort of hypnotic all the same.

Listening to the music was like being on a raft in a river.  Grace floated.

 

It was only when she’d been watching Pony for long enough that her right arm had gone slightly numb that she realized she didn’t know what the killjoys intended to use her Battery name _for._ They already had her ID number; what else did they need to find out who she was and who her family had been? Unless they hadn’t needed it at all. Maybe all of this was a set-up for her to trip up. Or, really, for the BLI plant in the shape of a girl to trip up.

Grace had thought about it.

Then she looked over at Pony, with Armstrong (as Death-Defying had called him) crooning about being forgiven in her ears, and she decided she didn’t much care. If they kicked her out later—she would deal with it. She just would. For now she was here.

Regardless of all of it, she was here.

 

With a loud thump, someone jumped down on the floor from above them, by where Show Pony’s feet were laying. Grace startled, nearly dropping the jam-walker as she flinched and twisted in the dark to look towards the crawlspace opening.

Ghoul’s face showed up on the stairs, like he’d dropped himself to ground to do a press-up. “Hey kid,” he called to them—to Grace. “Mom and Papa are done talking. Time for us to blow this pup stand.”

 

-


	8. Making Crystalline

Grace didn't exactly know if the Fabulous Killjoys were spying on her when they finally got back to the diner after leaving Show Pony and Death-Defying's place. She knew that they were following her around a little, but that didn't exactly spell out _spying_. Kobra had been curious that first time he'd come outside to ask her what she'd been doing on top of the old diesel tank. Maybe the others were now, too.

 

Jewel didn’t help with the idea. She’d been trying to ask Grace, on the way back to the diner, all these _questions._ It seemed like they’d never end. “How’d you meet Pony?” She asked first, turning down the Zone 4 highway and speeding fast enough to pop tires.

Grace stared out the window for a second. She was getting tired of all this. “From my friends,” she said, louder than she’d normally talk so she could be heard over the hum of the road. But that wasn’t true. “I knew them before I met my friends,” she fixed it. “They picked me up off the road and gave me a ride to a fair.” She hadn’t been alone, but she wasn’t telling anyone that. She would not.

“When was that?”

Grace shrugged. “Don’t know. A while ago.”

“Was anyone else with you? Any names?” Jewel’s hands didn’t tap on the steering wheel.

Grace could see her from where she was sitting, but she wasn’t sure if Jewel could see into the corner backseat. “A few people,” she said. She couldn’t remember all their faces, but—“Snapdragon.” That killjoy had had the best name. “And two sugarspices that were in love in the backseat.”

Ghoul and Jet made some kind of noise that, together, sounded kind of like a fart. Jet was rolling his eyes while Ghoul looked like he was smiling.

Grace kept going. “Someone in a red jacket was driving,” she said, “I think another sugarspice, she was nice too.” And then there’d been someone without any jacket at all—a sunshine, brown skin and a picture of a necklace around his shoulders, what’d he been named? “Black Card,” Grace remembered. “He was there too.”

“You know Black Card?” Kobra asked, surprised. He hadn’t spoken up since they all trooped back into the car, but now he twisted around in his seat, peering at Grace over the edge of the cushion. His eyebrows were straight-up behind his fly glasses.

Grace mimicked his expression back at him. “ _You_ know Black Card?”

“Intimately,” Fun Ghoul commented, then burst out cackling when Kobra threw a punch at him. It was obvious Kobra didn’t fully mean it, he threw it pretty wide, but Ghoul fended it off with his outstretched arm anyway.

“Don’t make me crash this fucking car,” Jewel said from the front, and the brief fight stopped. Fun Ghoul put down his arms, still giggling, and Kobra rolled his eyes and sat back down on his seat facing the windshield.

Grace giggled a little, into her elbow. She noticed Jet, looking at her sideways with a smile.

“Who were your friends, though, honey?” Jewel pressed. “I mean, when you got there. To wherever they were.”

“Just friends,” Grace said. She didn’t mean it to pop out of her mouth like that but it did. “People I knew. Junk punks,” she relented a little, thinking maybe that’d get the crew to stop _looking_ at her like that.

“Yeah?” Jewel checked over her shoulder real quick and then did something that made the car shift and rumble for a few seconds before smoothing out. They seemed to be going off the road but it was enough like a shortcut that Grace decided not to freak out. “Which ones?”

Grace shrugged, to what limited good that would do. “Nobody you’d know,” she said.

It wasn’t exactly a lie. She had no idea how many people would know her old crewmates, partly ‘cause they didn’t even have a name. And it was all in a name, like they’d said sometimes. Grace didn’t really get what the saying meant all the way, but she could guess: ‘it’ was safety, and secrets. She knew—obviously—that people kept sand monikers for a reason. She didn’t like to think of the junk punks very much anymore, because she felt sore inside her chest and her head when she did, but they were still out there, somewhere, in the desert. Trading and dancing and shooting things. Grace couldn’t blow their cover now. Even to someone she trusted.

“Why do you care so much?” Grace asked. She didn’t mean to shoot it back, like a tin can at target practice, but it flew out of her mouth anyway, and she was genuinely curious.

Jewel didn’t seem to register her curiousness, though. For the most part she just seemed to want to keep Grace in the dark as much as possible. She kept her hands super tight on the wheel. “We just want you to be safe, motorgoblin,” Jewel said.

Grace remembered that saying. She was running out of reasons to not believe it anymore, but—but. Everyone else had left.

“Were you with anyone before them?” Jewel asked, trying to move on, and Grace cut her off with a, “Leave me alone!”

It sounded loud and super kid-like in the cramped car. Grace hunched in on herself, pulling her knees up onto the seat with a vengeance and burying her face in her knees, wrapping her arms around her head protectively. She seethed, and no one tried to talk to her.

 

When they’d got back to the diner that day Grace had ran inside, grabbed her messenger bag, and then hunched down in the corner under her table, mostly hidden from sight. It wasn’t comfortable down there but she felt stupid, and embarrassed, and angry; hiding was better than having to face everyone. She hugged Gear to her chest. The little robot had nothing to say.

The killjoys only called Grace out when it was time for the rations to be handed out, one can to one Runner. They all seemed to be ignoring her outburst in the car. Grace didn’t know if she was grateful or not.

 

 

 

The Fabulous crew seemed to keep a closer watch on her after that. She was worried that they might still think she was a plant, but after a week, her high-level nerves about it wore off. Sure, they were watching her more now. But aside from that everything seemed to be as normal as it got.

By the time it'd been about a month since they'd brought her to WKIL, she wasn't nervous about it much at all.

 

The close attention stayed a little annoying though. Especially when she wanted to leave the diner without spelling everything out to them. Especially Poison.

One night in particular, all she'd been trying to do was go out to give the cat its share of the evening pup can, and he’d stopped her at the glass door. He'd been the one at base with her for two days now, on account of his arm getting bent up the wrong way during a bait-and-switch job the crew had picked up that had went a little Costa Rica on them. Nothing involving nobodyfaces, thankfully. But he'd been moping about it. "Where're you going?" He asked, hand on one of his hips like he couldn't help it. "It's near dark."

"Just going," Grace said, looking up at him. (She'd been getting taller lately. It was pretty great.) "I'll be back in a split." If she waited too long the cat would go back to its hiding den. She sidestepped around him, scrawny enough she could fit through the gap he’d left between the outside of his arm and the inside frame of the door. “I’ve got a friend, that’s all.”

 

“You’ve—what?” Poison followed her out of the door and around the diner. He looked up at her—both hands on his hips now—as she made the familiar scramble one-handed up the metal ladder and carefully laid out her halfcan of food.

The kitten was sitting there, flicking its tail at Grace. It’d gotten a lot closer, slowly, over the days. It was getting more used to her, she guessed. Grace smiled at it. The cat would even come over and sniff close to her hands now, if she was patient enough. It still hadn’t let Grace touch its fur but she thought that maybe it would, if she gave it a little more time. “Nice to see you,” she whispered to the cat as it settled on its slightly-less-scrawny-than-before black haunches to chow down the food.

Grace watched it in satisfaction for a second, then hopped back down to the dust again.

Poison was scowling. "You've been giving fuck-near half your grub to a stray this whole goddamn time?"

"No," Grace protested, "Not for the first week. Besides," she added fiercely when Poison rolled his eyes and made a loud exclamation at the air about them, "'s what all you killjoys did for me, ain't it?"

That shut him up for a second. "It's not even like that, honey, we--"

"I know, you said," Grace interrupted, remembering the first week she'd been there, when Poison had talked with her at the table.  "I don't want it to die either," she said.

Poison's face twisted up for a second, the way GR's had when she'd said something that stumped him. Grace waited to see if Poison was going to say anything. Eventually he just shook his head and stepped backwards, making to follow her inside again. He combed his damp hair through his fingers. "You'll be the death of me yet, youngling," he muttered.

Grace turned while she was walking to look back towards him, wrinkling her nose. "It's just a kitten," she said.

Poison laughed like that was funny.

 

Grace had thought that that'd be the end of it. Honestly it was just a cat. And they were giving her the can anyway, it wasn't like she was wasting it or stealing someone else's supplies.

But apparently Poison had glitched about it to the rest of the crew, because the next night that all of them were in the diner together—it was a couple days—he started in about how neither Kobra or Jet Star had noticed that "the roadgoblin is giving away half of her goddamn food".

They'd all been lounging around the main room, mostly in separate booths except for Poison and Kobra. What'd followed was both Kobra and Jet looking up like they were blinking into sun, and after that an argument that fell pretty fast into jokes and indignance and also Ghoul snickering to himself in the corner.

Grace had gotten real tired real fast of the fake argument. Poison's bight red righteousness, Kobra's amused neutrality, Jet Star's defensiveness, none of it changed the fact that the food was gone and Grace was milkshake and the kitten out in the dust was also fine. If anything it seemed like she should've been the one everyone was yelling at. She’d fed the cat the kibble, not any of the grown sunshines.

"Why're you shrieking at them?" She said finally, getting annoyed enough to talk. She’d been absent-mindedly playing with Gear when the words had started; now she was sitting on top of the table, holding the toy robot tightly.

The group looked over at her as one, eyebrows going up.

"I fed the cat," Grace insisted. "Nome of them did. Why're you talking to them like they did it?"

"You're annoyed 'cause you're not catching blaster fire?" Ghoul asked, voice that particular pitched up it got when he was talking to her.

"No way," Grace said, "Just-- it was my idea. Nobody told me to do it."

Kobra and Poison shared a glance for a second. “We figured, honey.” Jewel said. “We just—”

“He’s worried you’re not eating enough,” Kobra said, not making fun of Poison but even so, the words themselves are kind of mocking.

Grace felt like she was going to laugh, but no one else was laughing; something inside her head swooped and dimmed. “I don’t need any other parents,” she blurted out.

No one had been laughing or talking, but now they were _really_ not doing either. The silence got heavy.

 

Grace’s hands buzzed and her head felt full. She’d been sitting in the corner booth, but she got up now. She didn’t know she was going to walk out until she was pressing on the warm glass of the front doors.

Outside the desert was hot and quiet, like usual for that time of day. Without really thinking where she was going Grace wheeled around to the side of the building and climbed up the old oil or gas tanker mechanically, like she’s a little robot herself and there’s dust in her gears.

The cat was sitting at the opposite end of the tanker, a little puddle of dark fur and sharp ends of their feet. They bristle when she scrambled gracelessly onto the metal surface, but didn't run away or even flinch. 

Normally that would've made her happy. But for the first time, Grace didn't care. She curled her feet towards herself, holding onto her ankles and bracing her elbows on her knees. She was crying. She hadn’t even noticed that she had started crying, but now that she was, she couldn’t stop. It wasn’t a flood; more like a slow drizzle, like the endless days of  rain back in Murder City. Thinking of that made her think of Hope. The sharpness in her chest hurt more, abruptly, and she let go of her ankles to try and clutch at her heart, lungs stuttering like she'd somehow forgotten how to breathe. She didn’t even _know_ why she was so _sad._

Something brushed against her. Grace flinched sideways before she looked; and then the cat insinuated itself into her lap from under Grace’s startled arm. It laid down, putting its little cat chin on her thigh, and then started… rumbling. Like an engine. Its skinny tail flicking back and forward, then curled around its skinny back legs.

Grace could feel the cat’s claws on the soft inside skin of her calves. She stared, unsure, too surprised to even cry anymore. She put her hand softly on the cats’ back. Its fur was grimy, grainy like it’s full of sand, but still soft. She could feel ridges and sinew under the softness, and its little ribcage breathing in and out.  
The engine-rumbling was weird, but Grace felt it seeping into her bones. It made her feel a little better. The cat’s warmth was nice too, even compared to the muggy heat of the desert air.

 

Grace wasn’t sure how long she sat out there. She was starting to make a habit of this, she knew, breaking and then running away, and she felt crappy about it, but she still didn’t want to go back inside. She especially didn’t want to move now, with the cat as a rumbly weight in her lap.

 

Eventually there was a knock on the metal of the tanker; she looked down to see both Kobra and Ghoul standing there. They look at her appraisingly. “That one yours, then?” Ghoul asked, gesturing a drawing-covered hand to the cat in her lap.

“It’s just a bag of bones,” Kobra said. He’d pushed his glasses over the top part of his hair so he could stare up at Grace and the kitten.

Grace stared back at him, then back down at the small animal in her lap.  
The cat had stopped rumbling, which for some reason almost hurt Grace’s feelings. It was craning its fuzzy head so it could see above her legs, pricking its ears forward. She noticed that one of them had a tear in the triangular corner, like the cat had gotten into a fight with something. _Bones._ As good a name for the cat as any she would’ve come up with. And the cat had picked her, hadn’t it?

“I like her,” Grace said back down to the sunshines.

“Kit seems to like you,” Ghoul replied. He rubbed his hand through his hair, like messing it up made him feel better. “Kid…”

For a second Grace thought that Ghoul was going to try and talk about something. She felt her shoulders hunch up even before he’d said a word.

Surprising her, though, he didn’t. He just offered up a smile and gestured for her to come back inside, Kobra nodding behind him.

 

 

He spoke up the next afternoon instead.

Grace had mostly gotten over her embarrassment again, mostly because everyone else seemed to be ignoring it entirely. Grace felt okay sharing the diner with the four killjoys again. Her and Kobra were even sharing a table. It was the same one they had played cards at, across from where the dead Draculoid had laid.

Grace felt sometimes like she was stuck in a loop. Scared, running, sick, avoiding, and then slowly and evenly getting kind of used to a place, but then she gets scared again. She was tired of it.

This time, though, Bones was laying sprawled out beside her elbow on the table. The cat was snoozing in the sun puddling through the windows, laying with her belly out and her paws relaxed. Her belly is mostly white, like her feet. One of the cutest things that Grace had ever seen.  
The cat had slept curled up beside Grace in Grace’s little jacket-nest the night before, after she’d carried Bones into the diner on her shoulder. It'd made Grace feel a little better.  
It was kind of amazing, what having a friend can make you feel better about.

Aside from cat adoration, Grace was practicing shuffling and counting with one of the decks of haphazard cards from the supply room. Jet and Poison had gone on a scouting trip for one of their allies or another—the Fabuolous crew knew so many people, Grace didn’t try to keep track anymore. Ghoul was in the supply room. From the sound of it he was picking at something, although Grace didn’t know what. Kobra sat opposite her, twisting radio wires apart and back together again. It’s been quiet for a while now. The boom box had ran out of batteries a few days before. The adults made a big groan about having to find someone to trade with pronto, but Grace kind of liked the quiet.

 

“Motorgoblin?”

Grace looked up from her seven of stars, which she was trying to pair. “Huh?”

Fun Ghoul was standing there, his long hair tied in a loose ponytail at the top of his head, held together by what looked like an old shoelace. His hands were covered in car-grime. He wiped one through his hair anyway, and smiled. “Can I gab with you in the workshop for a second?”

Grace turned to Kobra, who only looked up from the wire tangle and raised his eyebrows over his glasses before he focused back on his work.

Grace put her cards down and reached over to pet Bones. The cat’s fur was super-warm from the sun and comforting. Bones made a little ‘brrp’ noise that sounded like a question, opening its yellowish eyes towards her curiously. Grace just smiled a little, and it closed its eyes again, yawning expansively. Grace felt herself relaxing too. “Can’t we just talk here?” She asked.

In response, Kobra slid out of the booth and slid the wires off with him. He stood up after somewhat awkwardly moving his knees around the edge of table, and nodded at Ghoul, moving over to another booth in the back of the diner to continue his project. Giving them privacy, apparently.  
Grace swallowed a little nervously. Keeping her one hand on Bones helped her concentrating on not making fists.

Ghoul clambered into the booth where Kobra had made space. He tapped on the table’s linoleum for a second, reached into his vest (which he always wore when he was car-wrangling) and pulled something out from it. A small, folded piece of paper. He unfolded it carefully, like something precious, then passed it to her.

Grace took it and found herself staring into someone’s eyes. It was a WANTED poster, with the usual red ‘X’ over the black and white zonerunner’s headshot. The person under the X was white-skinned and dark haired, and has dark eyes like they’ve seen a lot of stuff and laughed at most of it. Grace looked up, confused.

“Jammer Sand,” Ghoul explained. He was smiling a little as he looked at the picture even though he’d only be able to see the blank side. “My partner and in crime.” He paused, then pulled on the string on his neck that Grace hadn’t noticed before. It held a small nut on the end, polished and bright. “This is from her bike,” he said.

Grace nodded, and then nodded again. Her hand crept up to her own neck where the small metal dove sat on her throat, always. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken the necklace off. “Is she a ghost?” Grace asked.

Ghoul shook his head. “Nah, nah. Thank fuck. She’s still alive and kicking particles everywhere.” He was still smiling, kind of goofily.

Grace relaxed a little. “That’s good,” she said. She looked down at the page again and then set it on the table, passing it back over to him. She hadn’t known Ghoul was married.

Ghoul took it and held it in his hands for a while. When he was folding it back up, he said, “I’m showing you a poster of her instead of askin’ her over here because she’s in One right now, with the Tunnel Rats.”

“Oh,” Grace said. “That’s super far away.”

“Yeah.” Ghoul’s grin slipped a little, then faded entirely. He tapped the folded poster and then hid it safely back in his shirt. “Do you know about the Tunnel Rats?”

“Not except that they’re Rats that live down in the tunnels,” Grace said.

“Hey, that’s still milkshake. Yeah, they live in the tunnels, right under the City—under BLI itself. I think they’re braver than most of us, but.” Ghoul shrugged with one shoulder. “They’ve got the whole goddamn place mapped out like a city by itself. They can run forever down there, and if you’re not with a Rat, you get lost so fast you starve to death.”

Grace waited. Sometimes it could take Ghoul a little while to get to the point.

“But, anyway. They’re an accepting crew—they’ve got all kinds under there. Some of them are doctors, nurses. People who got out from the city but still wanted to help out, crystal?”

Grace nodded again.

“It’s shinier to do that when you run with the Tunnel Rats. They’ve got a almost direct line in the Industry; they can get meds, equipment, bandages, blood.”

“Blood?” Grace wrinkled her nose.

“Gallons of the stuff in little plastic bags.” Ghoul looked like he found her grossed-out face funny. "There’s people who know how to switch it out with the kind in people’s bodies if they’ve been hurt real bad. Otherwise you’ll get dried up faster than the desert at noon.” He lost his playful expression then, and cleared his throat. “That’s one of the reasons that if you’re top-heavy— if you’re having a baby—it can be real good to go out and stay with them.”

Grace sat up straight. “You’re having a baby?”

“Jammer is,” Ghoul said. “I, uh. I mean, obviously I helped.” He paused, and then with something of a trepidation. “Motogroblin, d'y--”

“I know people have sex to have babies,” Grace said, rolling her eyes. What did the killjoys think she was, an eight year-old?

“Shiny,” Ghoul said, with relief. “Just, you know. I wasn’t sure.”

It was a passing comment, supposed to just be a joke, but Grace felt her stomach sinking a little again anyway. He wasn’t sure because she’d never told them anything, really. She looked at her cards where she’d put them face-up on the table, and then at Bones, who was still basking in the sun. She’d learned already in the very short time of Bones being an in-diner cat that putting one of her hands’ on Bones’ belly could end in her hand with clawmarks, but she risked it anyway.  
Bones was purring. (Kobra had told her that word, when she'd asked him what the cat was doing the night before.) The steady thrum and rise and fall of her heart and purrs made Grace feel real. She was here, not in the forest past the factory or the creaky van or anyone else. She breathed out.

“Jammer can hold her own. More than hold, really, she’s a way better shot than me. Or Kobra for sure,” Ghoul said a little louder, and then giggled when Kobra presumably flipped him the bird. “Uh, me and her talked a long while ago, thought, and we both decided it was a safer bet if she went out to Zone One for a few months. Until a bit after the baby comes.”

“Don’t you miss her?” Grace asked before she could stop herself.

“Sure as shit,” Ghoul said. “Every day.” He went quiet for a minute, putting his hand up to his chest where the bike nut hung under his shirt. Then he sighed, and looked over at her again. “I’m yakking all of this too you ‘cause… ‘cause I just want to be crystal about a thing.”

 _That I don’t belong here,_ Grace thought, and the thought is unexpectedly awful. Ghoul can’t mean it that way, could he?

“What you said before you busted out of the diner before,” Ghoul continued, “It’s… it got to me, a little. No one’s trying to replace your old parents, motorkid. Just, maybe,” Ghoul smiled again a little, the kind directed mostly at himself, “Maybe I’m practicing a mite.”

Grace breathed out a little. “Jewel was the one who was bothering me,” she said, wanting to explain. “In the car, and after. It wasn’t you.” She paused. “Is Poison having a baby, too?”

“Negatory,” Ghoul said. “Just me and Jammer. But that’s just the way Poison is, kidlet. He acts like that towards _Show Pony_ sometimes, if they’re going out on a run with us. It’s not just you.”

Grace snickered. It was hard imagining anyone telling Show Pony to do or answer anything they didn’t want do. 

Ghoul nodded, then cleared his throat, then stared at the table like he was planning his next words. “But I wasn’t trying to make you feel like I was taking over anyone you had before, and I shouldn’t’ve acted like it anyhow,” he said finally. “And. I wanted you to know.”

Grace knew a Zonerunner-apology when she heard one. She nodded, to show it was accepted. She even tried to smile a little.

Ghoul returned it. He looked kind when he smiled. “Milkshake.”

“Milkshake,” she agreed. “Thanks.”

 

Ghoul slid himself sideways out of the booth and stood up. “One more thing, motorgoblin,” he said. “Tell us where you’re going before you leave? I know there’s not a lot around here, but. It makes some people get real tetchy real fast if they think one of us is lost.”

“Some people,” Grace repeated.

Ghoul laughed. “Yeah. I’m not a snitch, but some people. Just shout us a word, alright?”

Grace guessed that that was fair. “Alright,” she said. She watched Ghoul lope back through the door to the garage to work on something or other, and then she picked up her cards again.

 

 

*


	9. Flashbang

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warning for bereavement in this one!  
> /

 

Based on Ghoul’s words and his kind smile, when Jet and Poison came back the next day at sunrise with news of a job and offhandedly ask Grace if she wants to go with them, Grace felt like it was mostly a chance to prove herself. A chance for the crew to spy on her a little more too, maybe; but they had good reason to.  
Grace got it now. It was simple math. People they cared about on one side, and on the other a kid who they didn’t exactly not-trust but who’d just shown up out of the sand one day and hadn’t really told them anything.

Grace had an idea about the desert: any crew you grew into instead of up with, you needed to prove yourself to them.  
She could do that.

 

 

The job, when they started, was different than the last time she needed to prove herself. For one thing it wasn’t raining, and even if it was she wouldn’t be scared of the rain; and for another they’re not stealing drugs from a storehouse. Just visiting old friends, basically. Along with whatever contraband they were trading in for.

 

Grace had less gear than everyone else, so when she had her scavenged jacket on and her mask-rebreather ready, she made do by tossing or handing things to the Killjoys that they needed, to grateful nods. It still took them all a while to get ready. The Cobras needed high fashion as a crew could jump, or they’d take them less seriously. Grace remembered that from the last time she’d met with them all, out by a weird mirage of a lake that’d kill you if you drank it.

Poison was, as usual, pulling things apart and sideways. Then she had a sudden gender switch in the middle of the morning and near-caused a riot turning the diner upside-down for her feminine clothes, which apparently she hadn’t pulled out in a while since they were more precious than their regular rags (except for their jackets). Most of the clothes that got manufactured in Battery, smuggled out or outright stolen and then bartered off, was either plainly cut or meant specifically for muscles and brawn. Drac uniforms, which were the easiest to get your dusty hands on and pretty good for making pretty if you wanted, were all jeans and vests and flat button shirts.

Ripped leggings with jagged patterns, like the one that Jewel finally found and pulled on, weren’t easy to come by or cheap. They’re really pretty, though.

Grace told her so, and Jewel spared her a second of a smile.

When they finally all get in the car Jewel has on her black leather Pegasus jacket, the leggings, a white skirt that ends just above her knees which was somehow just as tight as her white jeans, and at least three centimetres of glitter. It coated her seat and gently drifted off of her in shimmering waves every time they took a bumpy turn in the road. In very short order the glitter got over everyone else and the Trans Am itself. No one was too bothered, though. She’d only meant to put some on, but, as Kobra said in a long-suffering tone, there was zero such thing as “some” glitter. On them all, it looked like constellations of stars.

All or nothing. Like the crew.

Jet and Ghoul had mostly gone for black everything, with the obvious exception of their jackets and blasters, and both of them had their rebreather tucked under their arms or set up on their laps for the car ride. Kobra had slicked his hair back with something that may or may not have been actual motor oil, and picked a white shirt with a blue design and hacked-off neck and sleeves, under his bright red jacket of course. He had his helmet tucked under his arm. Everyone had their eyemask on.

Grace, for her part, had worn what she always did (her necklace safe inside her shirt), but she’d also tied Burns’ scarf over her hair like a bandana. It felt weird, having her hair all squished next to her head, but it looked shiny. Enough to match everyone else, anyway, or at least she thought it might.

 

“Do you think Lynn will still be with them?” She asked out loud after about ten songs and a handful of staticky silence worth of driving.

Jet, who had squeezed into the middle for the trip with his long legs splayed to either side of the middle like a basking lizard, was the one who answered her. Jewel and Kobra were having a low-voiced adult discussion in the front, and Ghoul had fallen asleep with his mouth open. “Maybe,” Jet replied. “I heard she’d gotten her own crew together, but she could totally be hanging out with them for a day or so.” He smiled at Grace. “You thinking of showing her your new skills?”

Jet had been letting Grace practice with his guitar on and off, for a while now, in the afternoons when he stayed back at the diner with her.

Grace nodded, smiling hopefully.

 

The next second Jewel swore louder than seemed possible and jerked the car so hard to the left that it threw all five of them sideways.

 

Fun Ghoul’s yelp at being woken up by getting slammed into Jet Star's elbow was buried under the sound of screeching tires, splintering glass and Jewel yelling a blue streak from the front. Grace instinctively threw out her arms, bracing herself against the inside handle of her door and against Jet Star’s side. Someone else was yelling something, maybe Kobra shouting into the two-way microphone on the radio, but Grace’s pulse was trapped high in her throat and her ears were ringing so hard it was like her head was a feedback loop full of fault wiring. She could feel the car twisting still, in a tight circle with an awful, sustained lurch.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Jewel shouted, and then there was a terrifying moment where Grace felt the bottom drop out of her stomach as the car tilted onto two wheels. Jet Star slid towards her on the spare centimetres of free space on the seat, pressing Grace sideways into the door, even as he threw up his arm to try and stop himself from squishing her. Grace squeezed her eyes.

But then, with an almighty _crash,_ the Trans Am landed with both sides of its wheels on the ground again. Grace was thrown forwards, only caught by the frayed strap of her seatbelt, which knocked out the rest of the air she’d had, and then as she was gasping she was thrown back again.

“Soundoff!” Jewel shouted, and Grace was too dizzy to process what the hell she meant. That didn’t matter, though, because a hand appeared in her vision and grabbed her arm, urgently.

Jet Star. She craned her head towards him and met his wide, scared eyes. She coughed up her voice again: “I’m fine,” she said, barely able to hear herself over the single-note whine in her head. “’m not broken--”

Jet Star nodded hurriedly and then whipped around to check on Ghoul, who was emitting a steady stream of swears. Kobra had craned his head around, too, practically climbing into the backseat, and swearing right over top of Ghoul’s oaths. “Hold _still_ you stubborn sandspitter I need to see if you have a fucking broken skull--”  

“Company!” Jewel warned, and where the oathing and previous yelling didn’t work, that word somehow did. The others were suddenly throwing themselves back in their seats so they could sit up better, pulling out their ammo and blasters and facemasks.

Grace grabbed onto hers, too, mostly out of instinct than anything; but it was still there over most of her face.  Her nose was bleeding, steadily, and Grace had a moment of panged sorrow that Burns’ pretty scarf would be ruined now. But she could wash out blood, if she needed to. She grabbed Quick, her blaster, with her other hand. Fumbling her seatbelt loose and standing up, wobbly, but trusting her feet, she grabbed onto the headrest of Kobra’s seat and hauled herself into almost standing up in the car. “What happened?!” She meant to demand it, like any angry killjoy would, but her voice came out all high-pitched and scared.

It doesn’t make much of a difference; Jewel’s too pissed to notice Grace’s small voice hints. “Fucking Drac’s in a fucking ambush in the fucking road,” Jewel spat. The steering wheel had sweat streaks from where Jewel had grabbed it and tried to crank it as sharply as the pneumatics would let it go. Right then she was fumbling with the dash, pressing buttons and yanking on levers. “Sit down and stay inside,” she ordered, and then her seatbelt cracked against the window and she’d dived out of her door. A parallel slam sounded at the same time from the opposite side of the car. Twisting around, Grace saw that Kobra had thrown himself out into the sand too.

 

That was when she saw him, through Kobra’s cracked and smudged window, and through the blinding sun glare beyond it. Grace’s head hurt and spun but her eyes still caught onto the shape. Smooth head, backlit to blur the face. The fanciest clothes she’d ever seen, neither monochrome or in colour. Standing and staring at destruction.

 _Korse._ On top of a small dune just off the side of the road, where the Trans Am had skidded to a stop. Draculoids pouring from all around. And the Exterminator, standing still, looking down.   

She remembers him, that outline, from the firefight outside Murder City; for a second Grace was back in that terrible night, crouched behind a brick window with her little sister hanging off her while something blasts the wall to their immediate left into particles. She can’t breathe.

But no. _No, fuck_ that, she was _here_ now. There’s no brick in front of her, it’s just the car window, and she had her own blaster and she knew for a fact that Ghoul stashed heavier ammunition in the trunk of the Am, and as Ghoul swore a threatening boast and threw open his side door Grace suddenly realized she’s angry.

Her legs were already coiled like a spring. Jet Star lunged out of the Am behind Ghoul with one hand on his gun, and Grace threw herself out after him.     

 

Outside was chaos. There is noise and dust in every direction and all of it amplified by the tiny valley the Dracs drove them off the road in the middle of, barely more than a dip between hills, but penned in on every side anyway. It feels like a rock show except that Grace had only ever been in the middle of music this loud when she was surrounded by crew, by friends, and she’d never been this scared with them.

There was no way to count all of the Draculoids around them. There couldn’t have been that many at first—they’d’ve been swarmed while they were still in the car—but now it seemed like dozens. Or maybe less, but they were always _moving,_ it was so hard to tell. Grace wished they would’ve tried an intimidation tactic or something, lining up before they ran at each other, but of course that would make everything too easy.  She had her blaster and she used it, without thinking. She felt good and felt nothing at all when her shots hit the mark, watching Dracs hit the dirt with their rubbery faces no different from when they’d been standing and firing back at her. Her head felt empty. She was free. Her nose had kept dripping down her face and into her mouth so she tasted red and salt, and the heat and the constant twisting, diving into the sand to avoid getting blasted made her dizzy.  She saw the others in the dust by their flashes of colour, blurs at the edge of her hazy vision.

 

Very quickly, the fight got uglier. People were bleeding—there’s puddles of iron-coloured dust everywhere, where the dry sand had sucked up the moisture-- and Grace’s anger bled into exhaustion. She’d dived out of the car meaning to hit whoever she could get but especially the Exterminator. Korse was nowhere to be seen. Grace was too busy watching her back and her sides to notice.

Time didn’t make sense and space was bending. At some point, she caught sight of Ghoul bolting full-scale for the Am, and she’d followed him in case he needed help. Ghoul had circled around to the trunk, popped it and pulled some of the big guns. A couple were literally big guns, and a bunch of them are smaller and don’t look like guns at all. Grace realized what they were only when Ghoul pulled a part of them off with his teeth and then chucked one into the three-wide line of Dracs racing up to him; it scattered them like pebbles.

In one hit so much was over. Flash, bang. It looked so fake like that, the smoke and then they’re all just scattered and gone, that Grace started laughing. She could barely hear herself. Her head was swimming.

 

Someone she knew shouted so turned blindly towards the voice and pelted after it. She wasn’t following Ghoul anymore, just running. Zig-zagging, really, almost stumbling up into the hills. She could feel more than see Kobra on her left, through the smoke and the flying dust.

Somehow the battle had turned into a retreat. They were turning and firing every so often. Kobra was in hand-to-hand with some Dracs that had managed to get to higher ground and surprise him, a little while away from where Grace had been only seconds ago. Somehow Ghoul was still back by the car, taking out one of the Drac’s cars with a _fucking bazooka_ , and then another one. Jet—and it must’ve been Jet who called her before—was crouched behind a mound of rocks, avoiding getting blasted from a trio who were downhill from him. Jewel was nowhere, which was terrifying. Grace herself was aiming and firing and aiming and firing.

And then very abruptly she was alone, no one on either side of her.

Immediately: remembered when this had happened before, remembered being alone in the water—but that’s passed, so Grace breathed, trying to focus, and she snapped her head around, ears sweating under the scarf, her blaster arm raised. Her thoughts were simple: Crew. Math. Guns.

Somehow, in seconds, Jet and Kobra and the others had gotten a little ahead of her. They were kicking their heels deep in the dirt, bolting fast for a steeper hill lined with dried shrubs that was a little ways behind them, back toward the highway they’d rolled down to get out here. Easier to fight with your back to something other than each other. Ghoul yelled out something as he barreled past her.

There was a Drac following him and she took it down with two shots to the chest. She could feel herself reloading her blaster mechanically: compartment, wasted battery, ground, new pack from her pocket, handle, snap. She breathed and caught another Draculoid that was coming up to her across the width of its face; there were two more behind it, and she fired at them too, but missed. There’s at least five alive right now, two in front of her, and three more back by the car. She kept moving, looked towards her crewmates who were up the hill, then looked back.

 

The Drac she’d shot across the width of their cheek had peeled their melted face off to reveal an actual human face that wasn’t warped by plastic. It was familiar, but barely, the way a song you’ve heard a long time ago could be familiar. Thin nose. Tanned skin. Dark hair.

Grace slowed her running, turned around, even though she didn’t want to, even though she couldn’t believe it, it couldn’t be real, it _couldn’t be_ real--

She stopped breathing.

“ _Dad?_ ” She would’ve said, if her voice had been anywhere in her throat.

 

It couldn’t be him, but there was his straight brown hair, cut short and high on his forehead, so unlike Grace’s own curls that she’d use to tug on it and ask him why it was _so_ _weird, Papa?_ It couldn’t be him but there was his height, just tall enough that Grace could climb on his shoulders with an evenly-paced jump. His hands under the Draculoid-white gloves would have spindly fingers and a cut-thin nails and a gold band on his left hand ever since she could remember. There were his dark brown eyes that Hope had had, now glassy and with a thick trail of blood dried down from the corner of his left, looking up at Grace and not knowing it was her, not feeling anything. There was his not-smile which had been so foreign when she was a little kid, which she’d barely been able to remember in the City because of course nothing was ever wrong and if nothing was wrong then you should be smiling, even just a little, except now his mouth had blood on it too, oozing down from the wide laser burn that’d cut across his cheek.

That Grace had cut. She’d shot him. She’d hurt him, and she felt so horribly _sorry,_ she wanted to cry out, but it couldn’t be real, because her dad was dead, he’d died back in the City. That was why Mama had smuggled herself and Grace and Hope out of the boundaries of the Battery City and into Zone One in the middle of the night, why she’d taught them to walk against the sun and hide from policemen, he was _dead,_ the City officials had murdered him!

Grace remembered her mama crying in a broken-down shack in the middle of the night, shocked out of a nightmare, and spilling words to Grace that she never wanted to hear but couldn’t un-hear anymore than her mother could un-say them. Her dad was dead. He’d been shot, and her mother had been able to smell burnt hair and ozone through the thin walls of the department office, and she’d went home and grabbed her girls and ran.

This—whatever this was, in front of Grace, now, in this scorpion-fucking sandpit, this wasn’t him. This wasn’t real. She’d heard, in the Zones, how putting on a Drac mask when you weren’t dead was still just like death. There was some BLI tech in them that wiped your head clean. They’d done something to him, Grace realized, as her breath shuttered back into her lungs and she barely avoided stumbling over a rock behind and landing on her butt in the sand. Her limbs felt heavy and cold. Somehow, someone in the City, they’d—he wasn’t here, her dad, it was just his face--    

 

It was less like running and more like throwing herself down the small slope of the hill that she’d stumbled up, but she managed to stay on her feet. The thing that wasn’t her father lunged after her. He moved like a puppet, or like a spider, his expression not changing, and Grace wanted to puke.

It was ugly, even just from the corner of her eye. It repulsed her. It was _wrong_ and moved like a bug and wasn’t her dad and she wanted to squash it, like a spider, to erase it, burn it clean. 

Her skin was crawling and she was flinching so hard it was almost like earthquakes hitting her spine. When her hand hit the edge of the Trans Am’s trunk it came away bloody but she was too numb to feel any scrape. 

She’d never held a grenade before. She found one anyway, a black piece of metal almost bigger than her hand, and remembering what Ghoul did she reeled back from the car, holding it like a rock, and pulled out the little pin in the top and chucked it in one move. Through the air, through the smoke, to the thing that wasn’t her father, which was raising a blaster in her direction, its face blank and bloody, its eyes only tracking onto the small object sailing right to it when it was too late to stop. Grace had a lot of practice throwing things.

 

It wasn’t real, none of it, it wasn’t _real,_ but the sound of the explosion turned her legs into water. Grace hit the dirt and stayed down.

 

When the blastwave faded from her ears Grace found that she couldn’t feel anything, anymore, but she could still move. She got up.

There were somehow still nobodyfaces moving, over in the hills. Grace grabbed for her gun at her hip, looked down when her numb fingers grasped nothing, and saw her blaster in the sand by her foot. The loop she'd been using to holster it had broke. She scooped up her gun and stumbled forwards a few steps, then kept going. Her tears were soaking her face and stinging several small cuts that she must've gotten from bits of flying hardpan or flying rocks from the blast wave. Grace barely felt any of them; her head was  still too much of a screaming hollowness to process anything except keeping running.

She was heading towards the others, because there was safety in numbers. She knew this in the strange clinical way she'd known that Hope needed Battery City medicine when she'd gotten sick the second time after she'd gotten given the antibiotics, and also in the clinical way she'd understood that they had had to leave their mother's body behind.

Her whole family was gone and yet they didn't seem to be out of danger, even now, and she wanted--- through the haze of her shock and anger and fear and _shock_ she wanted to scream at the craziness of it, at how _unfair_ everything about this was. BLI had taken her father first and then her mother from her, had swallowed up her little sister like an offering, and now it only seemed to be spitting them back out _wrong_ in a way that hurt her personally, directly, like that was the point.

 

She only realized she was screaming, on and off, like a siren, when she finally got up the hill that the others had run to for cover. Everyone else had dashed to the hill's other side, down from the short plateau on the top. Grace slid down on one leg, yet more dust billowing up around her. When it cleared she looked up to see the others hurrying towards her.

Some sand got right into her face; she coughed it out and took a couple breaths to recover, which was right when Jet and Kobra's knees hit the ground in front of her and she could see their concerned and freaked out faces through her tear – blurry eyes.

Their own eyes were wide with worry. “What is it?” Jet was saying, frantic. “Where are you hit?”

Kobra wasn't saying anything, crisis gluing his lips shut like always, but he was holding his hands and arms like he was ready to press on a wound or check her over the second she gave an indication what was actually wrong.

Grace took in a numb breath to tell them that she wasn't hurt at all, at least not that they would realize or in any way that bled, but it came out as a sob. Once she started _that_ she couldn't stop. She started babbling too, without realizing it, the words bubbling out like blood from a cut.

“Is she bleeding?”

“Hold out your hand, roadgoblin--”

“Why would they do that? Why would they _do that?”_

“Where the fuck is Jewel gone?!”

“I’m getting the car.”

Ghoul peeled off, having said the last thing. Jet hovered, one hand on his weapon, curls wild with dust and gun-electric. Grace had had her own blaster in her hand when she’d slid down the hill. It took her a second to realize that Kobra had taken it from her and put it safely on the sand beside them. He was checking her over now, carefully pressing his hands on her gut and her back and her side and pulling them away, checking for red.

In some distant part of her brain she thought she should straighten out and help him, move her arms herself so he could see she didn't hurt anywhere in her back or her ribs, but she couldn't do anything other than lie down with her knees jackknifed up under her chin and sob into the sand.

Kobra finally stood up again. He scooped up her blaster and turned to Jet. With something to report his mouth had come unstuck, for now. “No bleeding,” he said. “Negatory for scorch marks, I can't-- she doesn't look like she's broken anywhere.”

“ _Move,_ ” Jewel voice interrupted, sudden and loud.

 

The two killjoys looked over their shoulders and then pushed themselves up out of her way. She sat down in the dirt on her knees, getting sand all over the pretty deep-purple leggings she’d wore.

Grace wanted to apologize to Jewel for making her wreck her pretty clothes, she knew Jewel liked them and they were hard to find; but like helping Kobra tell she wasn't bleeding, she just couldn't manage it. She was focusing too hard on not choking on her tears while all her family filled her head in a wordless, worthless, repeating hum.

“Cover us,” Jewel said over her shoulder to Jet and Kobra. There was a shuffle in the sand that kicked up a small cloud as they pulled out their blasters. “Is Ghoul getting the car?”

“Yeah,” Jet said. He sounded far away even though Grace could see his legs standing right there, only a few feet from her.

“Can you look at me,” Jewel was saying, so Grace did. Jewel's face was all pinched up in a worried frown and she had dye smeared down half her forehead again. All the sweat from when they'd all been running. Some blood, too, crusted with dust along her hairline-- her hair was sweaty and crusted over with dust too, sticking up everywhere. “Hey, hey, what the hell was that, honey?” She looked at Grace with her eyes wide and filled with what was either empathy tears or a reaction to the sand particles or both. “Who did you see?”

“He was already _dead,_ ” Grace blurted, because that'd been the refrain drumming through her head while Jewel had asked her questions; each word hurt like a laser shot to her heart and her lungs. “They already _killed him,_ Mama said, why would they send him out _again_? How could they do that?! Can't they just leave him-- why didn't they just leave him _alone_?!”

Jewel's face crumpled a little, unhappy and concerned. “Aw, honey. Come here.” She reached out to Grace and pulled her into sitting up by her left.

Grace managed to flail her right arm underneath her to the sand and relax her bent legs and push herself up while Jewel was pulling her arm. Once she was upright and Jewel had let go of her arm she pulled her knees up in front of her again, jacknifing again, and buried her face in the tops of her knees.

When Jewel asked her again, “Tell me who you saw, honey,” she answered without thinking about it much.

“My dad.”

Jewel didn't respond. Grace's mouth just kept moving. “Everyone was gone but that was _worse,_ why would they do that? Why can't they just leave me alone. They already took him once, why would,” and then she hiccuped and couldn't talk anymore, curling her arms around the edges of her knees and sobbing grossly, spit bubbles popping against her jeans and getting all over the rest of her face as well as her tears.

There were a few scant seconds of quiet other than herself, and then some shifting sand like someone was standing up.

“What're you doin'?” Grace heard Kobra's questioning murmur above her, even through the hum in her brain and herself crying.

Grace felt Jewel's arms reaching out to her like the shadows had physical weight, and somehow that flipped a pride switch that nothing else had.

She flinched backward and flew her hands out behind her at the same moment, using that motion to scramble to her feet. Standing up so fast made her dizzy and light – blind for a second, but she spent the second scrubbing at her face with her dust – covered sleeve even though the particles scraped and stuck to her tear tracks. She took in a couple gulping breaths and then forced out, “I'm _fine,_ ” dropping her arm to look up at the Fabulous killjoys in front of her. The Trans Am was farther in the distance than she'd imagined while they were running toward the hill, practically a nondescript box; had they really pushed the Dracs back that far? She thought she could spot Ghoul out, a thin black shape bobbing along the sand and getting thinner as he got farther away.

Jewel's soft noise of doubt brought her back to the front and centre. “I'm shiny,” Grace insisted, dizzy. “I don't--- I don't _need_ \--”

“Oh, honey,” Jewel said, and she paused when Grace cut her off with a “Don't!”, but then kept talking. “Listen. Fuck knows that we don't usually _say_ this but can you stop fighting for a speck a time and just _listen_?” She waited while Grace paused, trembling in her back and her arms and shoulders and sniffling even while looking forward defiantly. “There's nothing wrong with getting hit by a sad storm, alright? Witch knows it happens to all of us. There's nothing wrong with losing a bit after losing people.”

Her voice was grave and her eyes were sombre, and her talking about losing people with her face like that made Grace hallucinate for a second that her skin and hair were darker and she younger and there was a sunlight – spilled front entrance of an old school around the both of them, and that only made the humming loss inside Grace worse. She scrubbed her face again. Would she ever forget about them?

Jewel was a lot closer all of a sudden and she didn't reach out to grab Grace into a hug but it was clear enough from her moving that she wanted to. (Grace had no idea how she felt about that.) The killjoy continued, “But there's more nothing wrong with getting _help_ while and when you do, alright? 'Fact it's kinda neccessary, otherwise you get all this sad shit built up in your system and none of it will ever make any sense if it's been sitting in your skull for long enough, and what's any body supposed to do with that, huh? It gets so heavy you can't move.”

Kobra said, behind Jewel, “Trust me.” Then abruptly he half-turned and fired into a scant amount of black brush bushes that were a few dozen feet to their left. A stray Drac corpse tumbled out of them, alone and now lifeless.

Grace shook. Tears started streaming down her face again, even though she was resolutely staring at the ground now.

“You need to let that shit out,” Jewel said gently. “Listen, honey, you need to let that shit out, and then you need to take what you need to feel better. What do you need?”

That surprised Grace, somehow, asking what _she_ needed. She thought for a minute reflexively, at being asked a direct question, and along with the torrent of names and faces that she'd want _not-gone_ there was the simple, kiddish idea of someone holding onto her while she cried it out. Even her and Hope had clutched at each other when they were sad. She looked from the ground to Jewel's face in a quick flicker while her own mouth twisted, trying to swallow her tears; Jewel's face was messy and bleeding above her eyebrow and full of understanding, especially in her messy eyes. Grace had really had enough, then; she crumpled. Inwardly first, her shoulders curving around in front of her like she was trying to curl up like an armadillo, and then forward, stepping numbly into Jewel's arms and pressing her face to Jewel's chest, closing her eyes while the misery crashed in.

Jewel picked her up; Grace could feel it, her feet leaving the ground, but somehow she was more surprised about the fact that Jewel had let her cry at all than she was at being carried. For some reason this only turned the stupid _stupid_ faucet on inside her head more and she sort of clung to the lapels of Jewel's Dead Pegasus jacket while she cried. All at once she couldn't really talk or think, just bawl.

“Steady,” Jewel mumbled into Grace’s ear. She was holding her tight and kind of rocking back and forth on her heels. “Steady.”

“There Ghoul comes,” Jet said quietly from somewhere to Grace and Jewel's left. Jewel must have turned around. There was the rev of a motor in the distance, getting louder, and Grace thought _run_ and then thought _Mom_ and just kept going.

The motor got so loud it sounded practically on top of them, and Grace was relieved for a minute under the tears and sadof her brain because no City–manufactured car would have a muffler that loud, and then it cut out just as Jewel started to walk forward purposefully. Jet and Kobra's murmured conversation carried on behind her, but hurried now; they were keeping up.

There was a click and a slight scrape as the doors of the Trans Am popped open and then Ghoul shouted, alarmed and loud, “Is the goblin broken?!”

“We’re getting inside, Ghoul,” Jewel said clear as anything, which wasn't quite an answer. One of her arms let go from around Grace's back to grab at the door handle; another click and scrape, and then she carefully pressed on the back of Grace's fluffy head to hold her a little more steadily against her shoulder as she stepped sideways into the car. Distantly, Grace appreciated that because the car was so low; for a while, she'd bonked her head while trying to scramble into it. Three doors slammed: everyone's seats started scrambling and buckling at the same time. Grace's shoulders were still heaving with sobs and she couldn't look up.

As soon as the doors were slammed, Ghoul slammed on the gas pedal and the g-forced forced everyone's back into their seats as they sped away.

 

They were sitting for a while while Grace poured out her grief, although as the miles ticked away between the group in the car and the strewn bodies behind them in the desert her breath seemed to come a little easier.

When it seemed as though she was able to breathe more or less normally through all of the tears that were still pushing out of her eyes, Jewel started talking to her quietly. It reminded Grace of the little soothing fan noise – makers that had been in the first car she'd ever been in out in the desert, and had never seen again after about three  days. That made her shoulders shudder extra.

But Jewel didn't seem phased. She kept telling things in a steady, meant to be calming string into the top of Grace's hair, with her arms tight around the girl and Grace's head still basically pillowed on her shoulder and upper chest. It didn’t matter what she was saying, much. But she did answer Grace’s questions.

Like when after taking in a deep breath Grace had blurted out, “They took _everyone else_ already, why couldn't they just _leave_.”

Jewel had said, “I'm sorry, honey,” and repeated it gently until Grace had stopped shaking so much. Then she continued: “This is just the shit they do. There isn't-- there isn't a fucking, _why,_ not really. They’re fucking BL/IND.”

Grace wasn't sure how long they'd been driving anymore, but she knew that her tear had mostly been replaced by cotton balls someone had stuffed into her brain and she couldn't really feel anything anymore. “Why me?” She mumbled, in a tiny mouse voice.

Jewel kissed her puff of hair. “They want to wipe us out. That's all the why there is, really. That's what they _do._ It’s--- listen, we’ve twigged that you're from Battery, honey--”

Grace couldn't bring herself to pretend to be surprised at all, since she'd heard them talking about it in low voices while she'd still been in mostly-passed out feelings in the back room of the diner.

“-- and that's one thing, but you're out here now and you're one of us, alright? You are. No, don't even shake yourself up about that. You _are._ But, listen, that means that they want to take you out now, too. They use people that they'd hurt before because they're fucking evil, sugarhead. That's all there is too it.” 

Grace didn't want to think about people blatantly hating her and everyone out here that she loved-- especially not when she'd lived there for so much of her life **.** But she believed Jewel. A deep, settling belief that settled down into her soul like so much muck – heavy dust. It was certain and it hurt. Grace hiccuped – sniffled again, suddenly the sharp pain hitting her through the cotton swabs and then letting go.

Jewel's arms tightened around her in response. At some point Jewel hugging her would probably be more like crushing her but for right then it just felt like cuddling and it was _good_. It had been something she'd missed since she'd gotten to the diner, just hanging out with or hugging people or physical affection, as her Primary Educators would call it, besides the Fabulous killjoys occasionally ruffling her hair when she blasted a good amount of targets apart from the front of the diner and the targets had been set out onto the road, or a celebratory shoulder grab and shake when they all survived a dust – up, not like this one but like any of the other's they'd been through. It felt nice to feel like she was squished with love, again.

“And I'm sorry your da was out there, and whatever else happened to people you love.” Jewel said it like she knew there was other people Grace loved.

Grace wondered if she'd said something about anyone else. She didn't think she had, but everything she'd said before she'd gotten into the car with Jewel was hard to remember under the cotton balls.

“And I'm sorry it sounded like they were so many of them, but--- listen. Listen,” and Jewel took in a breath like this part especially was going to be more than fuzz – noise to calm Grace down, “All of us love you, alright? You've gotta be crystal on that. All of us love you a lot, and we're not going to be leaving you any kind of time soon. Not _everybody_ leaves. I swear,” Jewel added, sharply, like someone had spoken up to say that she was wrong about that even though the other three members of the car were totally quiet and had been more or less since Jewel had started talking to her.

Grace shook her head before she'd even thought of why she was doing it. Jewel was halfway through another sentence before she paused and asked, “What, honey?”

“You can't say that not everybody leaves,” Grace said, finding out that those were the words she was going to choose when they left her mouth. Her own voices sounded scratchy and ridiculous to her but she still felt mostly cotton ball – numb so it was almost funny. When Jewel started to say something with a interupting concerned noise in her throat, Grace shook her head again, just slightly so that the killjoy wouldn't think she was going to freak out and start bawling again. “No, I mean-- _you_ don't even stay that long, not really, not usually. And Poison's never this nice to me,” Grace said, the last point spilling out her mouth again although she hadn't meant to say it on purpose. Even though it wasn't _wrong,_ exactly. “I know you’re still him,” she said, “Or, I mean. It’s still you. But you’re never this nice to me when you’re Poison.” Or anybody, she thought. Jewel was scarier than Poison in a fight sometimes, and different in a lot of other ways, but she can’t imagine the killjoy hugging her like this on a sunshine day.

Jewel's face was scrunched up like she was upset about something, but she also had her lips in a thin and slightly crooked line. “… I will be now, honey,” she said finally. “I swear.”

 

Grace considered that for a second. She was still clinging to the killjoy because the road was bumpy, but she wasn't snuggling anymore, not really, although it had been _nice_. The hollowness of her head is mostly filled up now with her regular thoughts, and sorrow, but the part of her brain that was screaming is quiet. She thinks riding in the car against Jewel's heartbeat probably helped but she doesn't say that.

“We’ll show you the mailbox. I think it might be time for a letter trip,” Jewel said after a while, quieter than normal. She was still holding onto Grace, but then Jewel cleared her throat and spoke to the car in general. “Ghoul?”

Grace hadn't noticed that Ghoul was the one in the drivers seat-- even though it obviously made sense, since Jewel usually drove and she was back here. Grace quickly took stock of the rest of the car, then: Ghoul driving and looking in the mirror, Kobra half turned in his seat looking over his shoulder at them, Jet with his eyes still full of concern and now also tiredness but still mostly concern looking over at her, too. She was all of a sudden a little embarrassed that everyone was watching her like that and she was still sniffling, like a little kid. She took the handkerchief that Jewel had given her from her leg and used it to wipe her face, as inconspiciously as she could, and with her other hand she tried to pull back or pat down some of her hair.

While Grace was doing that, Ghoul said, “We'd do best gettin' back to the diner, it's late and there'll be more nobodyfaces prowling when the sunlight dies for sure. But, later,” he added. “Later we could. It's been a while since everybody's dropped in to be together, anyway.”

“Yeah,” Jewel said in reply to everything Ghoul had just lined out. Kobra and Jet made similar agreeing noises. Jewel's arms tightened a little as they rounded a corner and then stayed tighter, and she said, “How's that sound to you, honey?”

Grace had no idea what they were talking about and no energy left to ask. “Okay,” she said, putting the handkerchief down when she was pretty sure she'd scrubbed all she could without water or antiseptic soap off her face. The little cuts from the tiny rock chips still stung but they'd scab over by morning, and it wasn't _so_ bad. They didn't bother her. The way that Jewel sounded kinda wheedling did, like she was talking to Bones the cat or a littler kid who needed to be convinced of things, but Grace didn't mind too bad.

After a little while more listening to Jewel's heartbeat, Grace took a breath and said, “I shouldn't've wasted the grenade.” It'd been on her mind since she'd calmed down, and she felt bad. It was hard getting hold of those.

Ghoul spoke up from the front seat. “You didn't waste anything, roadgoblin. We were in an ambush and you thrashed a bunch of Dracs that would've and could've thrashed all our asses if someone hadn't moved fast. That's s'what grenades are made for.” He tapped his fingers with the words written all over them on the steering wheel like he was tapping out chords.

Burns used to do that, Grace remembered, with a small pang. Jet did, too.

“And you didn't get hurt or get no one else hurt,” Ghoul added. “Obviously two megapoint bonuses there. You did just fine.” 

Grace was quiet for a minute before she pushed out her foot to nudge the back of Ghoul's seat. _Thanks,_ the nudge meant.

Ghoul caught her eyes in the rearview 'cause they were looking up at it at the same time and then nodded, his eyes crinkling at the corners like they did when he grinned.

 

She didn't feel _better,_ exactly, but she felt less like a piece of stone. Lighter with all of that stuff gone, like Jewel had said she would. And, she decided, she was going to hold onto that feeling as long as it'd last, so she closed her eyes and started counting heartbeats again.

 

-


	10. Fault Lines

 

They don’t go back to the diner right away. They go to some mid-Zone safehouse Grace didn’t recognize or care about. It’d used to be an old motel or something, a place Before where people would come and rest from the road. It was a low building the colour of sand that only had one way in: through an old sagged window. The doors were all busted and half the walls buckled in, but the roof was solid enough that Jewel deemed it a good fit for a night’s rest in. “Fuck knows there’s not going to be anyone else to worry about, this far edge,” Jewel muttered to herself when she’d instructed Ghoul on where to go. Or maybe she was muttering it to Ghoul, or Jet and Kobra and Ghoul. Grace had no idea.

Grace was glad they wouldn’t be going back to the diner. Time passed so strange there, and it had ever since she’d woken up hurting and confused in that small room in a pile of jackets. If they’d gone back there, Grace was sure, all of this would all just reset somehow. And Grace didn’t want it too. She couldn’t go through this all again. She needed to change _something_ , and rat-fast.

 

When her feet hit the sand after Jewel gently nudged her off her lap and out of the car, Grace said something to the others that she didn’t remember three seconds later, and then she’d stumbled around to the other side of the cracked motel building.  
Ghoul went with her at first, to make a perimeter check. She stopped at the left side of the building while he continued around. When he’d circled back to the spot where she’d paused in the middle of the sand, he nodded at her and then went inside, leaving her on her own.

The desert hummed. No one was around for miles except some dry birds fluttering and croaking into the air from the slumped roof. Grace took in deep breaths, like she hadn’t been breathing the whole way back

The air smelled like nothing—like heat and dust. It was quiet out, and the sky was clear. She must’ve cried all of the blood out from under her nose, because when she put her hand up to her face there wasn’t anything that met her fingers except skin. Her cheeks had gone back to stinging again, since the numbness from the firefight and then the crying had finally worn off. Her hands hurt, too, and Grace didn’t remember why until she saw the imprints her nails had made on the inside of her palm. She stretched her hands out, shakily. They looked normal—small, brown, some freckles, dirty nails. Just her hands. Her wrists were normal, too.  
  
Against the normal of her hands, the dirty white cuff of her jacket stood out like a crack in a windshield. It barely even looked white anymore. Just dusted, and rusted; dried blood in puddles and streaks all over her arms, some hers and some that had been keeping others alive. Like a downed Draculoid laying in the dust.

Suddenly Grace couldn’t stand it. She wrenched the jacket off, snapping her arms out of the sleeves like it was burning her, and then chucked it on the ground. She wished it would make an explosion when it fell, but it just rustled slightly as it hit the sand. She stood, staring down at it, her breathing coming in gasps and her hands shaking.  
It’d been from her mother, and her sister, but it didn’t carry anything from either of them now.  
Grace looked down at herself and started wrenching her jeans off, too. There was no one for miles except the five Runners, it didn’t matter if anyone saw her underwear. She kicked off her boots at the crumbling wall behind her, one at a time, and the crack and clatter they made eased something in her brain, but not quite enough. When she pulled her jeans off they got caught on her knee for a second and the seam at the side broke, exploding into about a billion frayed ends and off-white hemming thread that hung like a broken arm. Grace yanked it off the rest of her leg and tossed it on the ground too, on top of the jacket.

It was bizarre how _small_ the clothes looked on the sand. She’d been overgrown for both of them for a long time.

She wiped her nose on her now-bare forearm, rubbing the sleeves of the old Hectic Glow t-shirt that Burns had given her a hundred years ago. She sniffled again. She quickly turned back to the wall and found both of her boots, laying on their sides. After checking in them for critters or rocks she stuffed her feet back in them, her heels scraping the inside through the hole in her socks. They felt weird against the skin of her shins.  
Grace turned back around, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed over her stomach. She wiped her hair out of her face and squinted into the sun for a second, then hiccupped and looked at the ground. Finally she gave up and cried, leaning against the sun-warmed wall by herself, one arm around her stomach and her other hand clenching her dove necklace, as always right above her throat, as hard as she could.

 

 

When she was done she took a couple deep, even breaths, like that would help anything at all. Then she squared her shoulders and stood up as tall as she could. She pulled at her shirt a little. It’d belonged Burns, who was a good deal taller than Grace was, so she didn’t need to worry; it hit her at about mid-leg and worked as well as a skirt might’ve.

Everyone looked up when she hop-crawled through the old sagging window that was the only way into the motel, and then they looked sideways when they noticed her scrawny legs sticking out the bottom of her shirt. She went right up to Jewel, who was breathing slowly and evenly where she was sitting down against what might have been a desk once upon a time.  
Jewel stood up to meet her. She looked frazzled, her hair even more a mess than usual and something making a mark over half her face, but she put a calm expression on. “What is it, motorbaby?”  
“I need to borrow a jacket,” Grace said. Her voice sounded cracked, like soil, but not shaky, and she was glad.  
Jewel blinked, then her gaze flickered to Grace’s shins, and she nodded. Since everyone brought in their important stuff for the night, in case the worst happened or someone stole the car, she had another jacket beside her. (Jewel had had a crisis of looks and thrown it down in the middle seat right before they’d left that morning, a million years ago.) Jewel handed it off to Grace, who nodded her thanks.  
Then, with hands that only shook a little bit, Grace looped the jacket’s arms around her waist so it hung as a loose and kind of weird skirt. Armoured, she turned to Kobra and took in a deep breath. “Can I talk to you outside? I mean, can you talk right now?”

 

Kobra shared a very fast and mostly wordless conversation with Jewel, then nodded. He got up from where he’d been sitting against one of the slumped walls and followed her outside.

 

She could hear Jet and Ghoul asking Jewel what the fuck, but she can’t bring herself to care too much. She held her fake skirt up with one hand.  
Kobra watched her with his eyebrows raised, looking concerned. The fight had been a lot for his head, so he hadn’t talked the whole way here. He was really only being kind, by listening to her.  
Kindness was what Grace needed right then. “Can I have my blaster back?”  
Wordlessly Kobra pulled Quick from his belt loop and passed it over. (His own blaster, also called Kobra Kid, had took up the holster.)  
Grace took it by the handle and held onto it like it was a knife, careful to leave it pointed at the ground.

Jewel (and Poison) was too careful making sure that words didn’t bother Grace, even if they were the true ones; Jet Star was too worried that _he’d_ bother her, even though he almost never did; and Ghoul treated her like a little kid, the kind who could helpfully be distracted with milkshake pictures and cool stories even when there was important stuff to do. Kobra wasn’t any of them, and he didn’t do any of that. He just stood back on his heels and waited for her to started talking.

She breathed in, and then swallowed, staring at the horizon past them both. “I used to live in Battery City,” she said. “I don’t know where the junk punks all came from.”  
Kobra blinked at her, like a cat.  
Grace swallowed again, determinedly not hiccupping. Her eyes stung from exhaustion and heat more than tears. It should've been impossible for someone to cry as much as she had today. “I had a mom and a dad and a sister but we had to leave because my dad had died; my mom brought us out here but then she was gone, it--" She couldn’t say it. “Then my sister and I we, we went to zone Two. Her name was Hope. It was only us, I’d—we’d met Show Pony on the greyline, and they brought us to a fair, but we got lost, and then my friends, _our_ friends were there, and.” And almost a year of living and talking and learning and hiding. Grace's entire heart hurt so much it felt like it was growing in her chest, like a fungus, squeezing all the air out from her lungs. Her eyes had gone all blurry. She tried to blink them clear but that didn't help, so she just took a huge breath and kept going. “We didn’t know them, but we got to. Seven of us. They were all junk punks. It was, we were okay there. But then there was a firefight. Someone got ghosted. And then Hope got really sick, and we had to go. They, they thought I was a plant, or _we_ were plants, but I’m not. I swear. And they got her meds, but she couldn’t _breathe,_ I couldn’t just let her die!” She burst out. Her voice sounded over-dramatic and thin in the wide desert evening.  
Kobra nodded, not saying anything, just processing.  

Grace scrubbed her face with her sandy hands. In the time between when they’d arrived here and when she and Kobra had come outside, the sun had gone dark. She shivered. “I took her to a Drac nest,” she said, still looking down so she wouldn’t see Kobra flinch or frown or whatever it was he was going to do. Her voice felt strangled. “Out in Two. Thought she was going to die, if I didn’t. Dracs take kids in, we’re different than you, if they think we’re not going to—to grow up wild, or anything, and if we don’t fight, they’ll just take us back into the City. So I—I just left her. I _left_ her.” Grace swallowed. “And then I just ran.” She'd wandered, sunburned and sand-blind, and she'd ended up at the diner.  
"And Ghoul found you," Kobra said.  
She nodded. “Yeah.” And then everything else.

After a second, he offered her his hand. Grace held it, trying not to break his fingers.

 

It... she wasn't saying it right, not really. Hearing her, you wouldn't understand why she was so scared of rain, or how she'd got over it, or how the junk punks were more than just seven people and she'd loved all of them, and Hope had loved all of them even more, and it’d been so different but good to be around so many girls. (There had been mostly boys in her block of apartments, and the girls and kids from school had faded and vanished from her memories as the BLI drugs lost their hold on her system, so to her it was like they hadn’t existed at all.) She wasn't getting the surprise of learning everything about the desert that she had right. She wanted to ask if the Fabulous killjoys knew how to eat the prickly pears off a cactus, or if they’d ever made cactus moonshine. She wanted to ask if they were other sugarspices out here other than Jewel sometimes and Vicky and Lynn The Gunn and Cherry Bomb, if they knew other women, or if for some reason they all stayed more in-Zone. She wanted to tell him about Hope. Not about what they'd done, but about her little sister; how much she'd liked to play word-games, and how she trusted other people.  
Grace couldn’t find the words for it, though, so instead she just left the air quiet for a minute. Kobra waited with her.

  
“I need to go back inside and talk to everybody,” she told him, when she could talk again.  
“Alright.”  
Grace stared at the dirt, then kicked it. “But… can you talk for me, first?”  
Kobra paused for a second. “Yeah, motorgoblin,” he said quietly. “I can do that.”

 

Inside the slumped motel again, Kobra outlined everything that Grace had told him to Jet, Jewel and Ghoul. A kaleidoscope of expressions spilled across all of their faces as he talked.

When he was done, all the group looked to Grace. She tried to talk against the thrumming of her heart in her throat. It worked.

“I want to change my name,” she said, to all of them.  
Ghoul looked surprised, Jet and Jewel happy, and Kobra she couldn’t tell because he’d stood beside her for support. Grace added, “I want you all to help me pick it.”  
A desert name was one you made with a group, after all. There wasn’t much point in fake-ones if you didn’t have people who would call you it.

The air in the room had been tense, and sad, but now it kind of let out, like everything breathed out at once.  
  
What’d they been expecting when she’d said she’d wanted to talk? Something bad, probably. For sure not this.

“Sure, motorbaby,” Jet said. He scratched the back of his neck with his opposite hand. “What’re you looking after?”  
_“_ What about sugarhead?” Grace asked, looking at the ground and then over at them.  
“What?” Ghoul asked, sounding genuinely confused, at the same time as Jewel said, “Definitely a negative.”  
Grace blinked. “It’s a word for kid,” she told Ghoul first, “’Cause our head’s are supposed to be all soft-spun and--” She spun her hand around her head, hoping to demonstrate. “Sugary. The junk punks said it all the time.”  
Ghoul’s face did that complicated spasm of emotion that it always seemed to when Grace mentioned her old crew, but he nodded. She nodded back.  
“And why not?” Grace added, turning to Jewel. “There’s nothing wrong with it.”  
“Still negatory,” Jewel said firmly. Her cheeks and nose, Grace noticed suddenly, were tinted a little bit pink. Grace looked to Kobra instinctively and Kobra was looking away too, but the solid kind of too-long look away that meant that he was doing it on purpose, not just having a attention break.  
_Uh-huh,_ Grace thought. She didn’t want to know anymore. “Fine,” she said out loud. She stuck her hands in her pockets and looked up at the ceiling.  
  
“Jet?” She asked.  
“Whatever you like,” Jet Star said. He looked earnest.  
Grace pressed her teeth together. “I _can’t_ think of one I like,” she said, a little frustrated.  
“Sweetheart?” Jewel suggested.  
  
Grace she shook her head. “It sounds like you’re going to eat my heart,” she said. “You’re not, like, a bad queen.”  
The four of them suddenly burst into laughter, like full-on tipping their head back, and it took a minute for Grace to realize what she had said. She buried her face in her palm. “I didn’t mean it like that,” she complained.  
“Oh, don’t fret, honey, you didn’t say anything not true. I’m the _best_ queen,” Jewel said, and she flipped her hair backwards with her hand.  
The group twittered like birds again, Grace lowering her hands. “It’s—it’s from a story,” she said. “It’s the one where there’s a beautiful girl and an evil queen who wants her dead because she wants to be more beautiful, so she sends a—a hunter out to cut out her heart and bring it back so the queen can eat it so she knows the girl’s dead.”  
Jewel’s eyebrows had went up. “Huh,” she said.  
“It’s a good story,” Grace insisted, sidetracked now. “Her name’s Blanca Flor and there’s a prince who sees her in the woods and thinks she’s an angel so he builds a church for her, and—aghh!” She flinched sideways, shrieking.  
Ghoul had grabbed her wrist without her noticing and was pretending to gnaw on it. She managed to shake him off, and he sat back up, giggling. “It’s no use, crew,” he said gravely, “She’s too dusty to eat.”  
  
“You’re pulling legs,” Grace accused. She wasn't mad, though she'd thought she might be. She felt kind of shaky, but glad too. She felt like a whole mess. Mostly of colours.   
  
Ghoul just grinned. “Okay, so not sweetheart,” he said. “What about just motorbaby?”  
Grace looked at the ground quickly, and then back up at them. “Nah,” she said, and then with a push of confidence, “That was the punks’ name for my sister. And not just Girl, either, that was their name for _me,_ too.”   
  
“Alright,” Kobra said, stepping up to fill the silence. He was looking back at her while idly fiddling with some of the dials on his jacket.  “Something else, then.”  
This is the most Grace had ever talked in front of all of them, and it’s making her dizzy and nervous, but less than she might’ve been before. She closed her eyes, trying to think. Not anything the five of them had said; nothing scary or weird. Something she could use. When was the last time she’d felt useful? What was something the Fabulous killjoys had given her?  
She opened her eyes again. “You always call me something,” she said to Jewel. “What is it?”  
“… honey?” Jewel asked. When Grace nodded, she explained. “Well, it’s a sweet thing. Used to come from buzz bugs, but, it’s just. It’s just a word. It means you’re sweet.”  
  
“Okay,” Grace agreed. Everyone looked at her and then seemed to blink all at once when they realized what she was saying, exactly. She stood up a little straighter. “That and-- and ‘Grenade’. All of you have two names. And... I like them,” she said. It wasn’t quite the truth; grenades scared her, but they also scared the blood out of Dracs, and that was good enough. And maybe it’d be like bad luck beads; if she kept the scary idea close to and a part of her, at all times, maybe the real grenades would stay away.  
“Honey Grenade,” Poison said, just to confirm.  
“Honey Grenade,” Grace said. "Okay." She closed her eyes.   
“Okay,” Honey Grenade said. It felt a little strange, like sliding a new jacket onto her shoulders. A nice jacket though.  
  
  
“Shiny as chrome.” Ghoul said. He clapped and then held his hands up for Honey to hit back. He was smiling. Jet Star quickly stepped up beside him, offering his hand in congrats too. Behind them, Jewel laughed a little, shooting Honey a smile bright as a sunbeam.  
“I’ll drink to it,” Kobra announced.

Honey laughed a little, and then she started crying again, because that’s how she felt. But it wasn’t entirely a bad feeling, that time.

 

*

 

In the morning Poison was feeling boyish again, so he wrangled them all up as soon as dawn was bleeding light over everything. Kobra muttered something poisonous and then goes outside the mildly-cramped front room, probably to do his daily excercises. Jet got up, immediately checked everyone for signs of problem, and then crawl-climbed his way out of the low window which was the only entrance or exit to the place to go and look for some problems.

Ghoul, for his part, woke up Honey with only a slight shake of her shoulder.

For a second when the eleven-year-old opened her eyes the world spun; then everything settled again, as much as it had been the day before. Honey stretched her neck, arms and legs, and then got up, straightening the jacket-skirt she’d slept in and feeling around for her gun.

 

Poison, after he’d finished marshalling everyone else, suggested that they get the hell in the car and go home.

The back window of the AM still had a laser-gun split sectioned right through it, so they all had to pull on their rebreathers or face-coverers and try to do the best they could to manage the sand. Honey pulled out a purple scarf that had been Burns’ before her, as well as the small facemask she and Ghoul had found back at the Dumpster Possum’s place, what felt like years and years ago.

The bandana was soft as water under her fingers and still made her sad to hold. The scavenged facemask still pinched her ears and made everything smell strange.

Even under her masks, though, Honey couldn’t help smiling a little.

She had a name, and a gun, and a crew, and a car. And a place to be driving too.

_Home._

 

 

  


-x-


End file.
